I love the internet. My wife and kids tend to resent, a bit, the amount of time I spend scrolling through facebook and commenting on various stories on the Huffington Post and Wonkette (although I spend a lot less time on Wonkette than I used to – it’s become much more serious than it used to be and not as funny), but I do not see it as wasted time at all. There is no real life
cartoon from xkcd – if you don’t know xkcd, you should
situation on Earth where you can have that kind of wide ranging (just now I was reading about, and commenting on Paula Deene, Edward Snowden, the Gliese star system, today’s horrifying Supreme Court decision to set voting rights back to where they were in the 1950s when most Southern towns were ruled by their White Citizen Councils, zoos, and Miley Cyrus), intelligent conversation with people from all over the world and all walks of life.
Yes, I said intelligent conversation, and I am serious. Of course, there are a lot of nincompoop comments; people who take whatever the conversation is and turn it into an attack on Obama, people who make stupid puns (O.K., I’m sometimes guilty of that one, too), people who say lol for no reason and people who type everything in upper case. Back when I was in about 5th grade, and already thought of myself as a great writer, I thought it would make my work much more exciting if I ended every sentence with an exclamation point. All caps is like that.
If you just learn to weed out the nincompoop comments quickly, separating the wheat from the chaff, the recyclables from the rubbish, there are actually a lot of worthwhile things being said.
Here are two more that I mentally shift over to the rubbish pile automatically:
1. Wake Up! (very often followed by the word sheeple) Since you hear it from both right and left, it is not at all clear what they want you to wake up to. Essentially, all it says is “I see things more clearly than everybody else, and think everybody should agree with me.” It is the conversational equivalent of the driver who comes to the tail end of a traffic jam and immediately honks his/her horn, as if everybody in front of them just forgot to move. Once you see the phrase “Wake up!,” you can safely ignore that comment.
2. What are you, 12 years old? They can’t refute your argument with facts or logic, so they’ll just try to be insulting, but it’s a stupid insult. There are some very clever 12 year olds and (on some subjects more than others) I am interested in hearing their opinions. Also, the whole beauty of an internet conversation is we don’t know who the other person is. We cannot judge them by their age, or gender, or clothing, or anything in fact except the content of their comment. So, you can just toss that one to the side as well.
Happy reading!
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