How the Internet ruined criticism

Interactivity is great as it means you can get your own say on things because YOUR opinion really matters and needs to be told to everyone on the planet as YOU are the undiscovered genius, YOU are the voice of a generation, YOU are saying what everyone else is just thinking.*

But interactivity started out on pretty boring subjects like voting for who you wanted to be your MP or local councillor and even then you could only utilise your power once every few years. Where is the fun and enticing prospect of abuse of power in that? Nowhere, that’s where.

Thankfully, with the advent of the digital era, having your say on subjects has become much easier what with phone-in radio and TV shows, Twitter, text messaging, TV shows which encourage you to vote, blogs and the ubiquitous comments box on any website you visit.

Now you can forward your viewpoint on any subject you like from whichever empty vessels get to spend another Saturday night being judged and sentenced by millionaires (that’s The X Factor folks) to what the simple solution that all the world’s leaders are missing is for the Eurozone debt crisis or the exact reason why Man City put six past United on Sunday and the consequences of that for the rest of the season.

Hail interactivity, leveller of the playing field!

However all opportunities and freedoms are horrendously open to abuse and just generally ruining it for everyone by making everyone’s opinions being easy to air. And so we come to being negative and how the Internet has basically ruined it.

The funny, funny people over at cracked.com have made a register of the ten types of angry commenter one finds online and for this exercise there are two particular categories that this blog highlights; the Busy Critic and the Angry Unfunner.

It might be best to have a read about those first before continuing. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you to finish.

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Wow, you came back. All done? Good, let us continue.

You’ll find these two types of commenter appear pretty regularly if you peruse the Guardian website. For example, here is a piece on Channel 4’s Marmite-ish new comedy-drama Fresh Meat. I say Marmite-ish as its divisive and opinion-splitting, not what it tastes like (that would be beer and kebabs as it’s a show set in a student house… zing).

Skip down to the comments section and the people who like the show generally give reasons why they enjoy it and, if they see fit to, offer constructive criticism for how it can improve. Contrast that to the negative commenters who leave a one line sentence fragment saying they don’t like it and moving on to do the same on another article. No attempt to explain why they dislike it or what’s wrong with it or anything like that. No way, that’s too much like hard work and they’ve got a lot of bringing people down left on their to-do list today.

In many ways they’re like the immature guy at work/school/uni who found it funny to come towards people, drop a fart and then move on, thus ruining everyone’s day. Or for a few minutes at least.

Want some more examples? Just on the top five viewed items on the Guardian culture section, you can see a similar story when it comes to a review of the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and even flipping David Attenborough isn’t safe!

This is just plain lazy, you’re entitled to your opinion just like everyone else but to not even bother explaining your point of view is an insult to be quite frank as it suggests you don’t have the time to contextualise your opinion, it’s just there and should be treated as important as those who justify theirs.

In a similar vein, the sport pages provide a similar, if not the same, trend when it comes to internet commenter warriors.

The general theme is either abuse the writer with a petty comment, as seen with this Jonathan Wilson piece or a snide remark about their being another article about Man United or Arsenal as seen here and here, almost as if the reader has been forced at gunpoint to read the article. As can be seen from the Wilson article, some of the commenters don’t even bother reading the article, just taking the headline and slugline and making a comment from that. Again, lazy criticism from people that are often the first to complain about “lazy journalism.” To them of course, irony is an alien concept.

These examples come from just the sport and culture sections let alone delving into the murky depths of the Comment is Free free-for-all.

What I’m getting at it is that t vast majority of negative comments on websites now are so generic and boring that they are worthless. They aren’t going to persuade anyone to shift their opinion on the matter as you’ve seen them a million times before so what’s the point in taking them in?

The general consensus is that the commenter is an individual who merely writes the negative comment for the sake of it rather than any real dislike of the subject of the article, the article itself or the writer.

More to the point, the reason why it ruins being negative is that it tars ‘real’ negative comments with the same brush; the comment being penned by a bored, sad individual with no agenda but their own pitiful amusement. Thus, proper criticism that is well informed, constructive and, crucially, has a point gets skirted over and placed into the generic, negative comment (by this reader at least) to be filed for ignore now.

Comment away below.

*Post note; don’t point out the supreme hypocrisy of reading this on a blog that has a comments section and Twitter interactivity button. That would not be cool, right?