But if most writers have long understood that publishing is a privilege that carries certain responsibilities—foremost among them taking the time to present ideas in a careful and thoughtful manner, ideally with the help of one or more editors—many readers seem to be approaching their commenting privileges like teenagers with newly minted driver’s licenses. Belted in by anonymity and often distracted by the equally reckless ravings of their peers, they take potshots, spread untruths, and, at their worst, spew racism and bigotry that would put a professional writer out of business in a nanosecond. In so doing, they spread a rancor that can eclipse not only the original article but also the comments of readers who take a more constructive, civil approach. They take the very privilege the internet has afforded all of us—the privilege of equal opportunity, instant expression—and spit on it, making the very notion of “speaking your mind” seem almost like a dirty practice, the national pastime of the lowest common denominator.
- The Believer, 2012
....I can’t tell you how lucky I feel that I came of age as a writer
before the blogosphere. I mean I had editors whom I worked with. There
was a long time to go back and forth on it — I mean, I wrote a whole
piece about this in The Believer, about audience reaction and
commenting. I started off before all that was really going on. You
weren’t writing something and then having readers instantly respond. You
heard about it in a few weeks when they started getting letters to the
editor, so it’s a very, very different experience.
Do you think writing with that instantaneous reaction would have inhibited your writing?
Definitely.
I notice this in students, and I notice this in younger writers. There
is a sense of looking over your shoulder as you’re writing and
expressing an opinion, because you have this anticipatory anxiety about
what the comments are going to say or who’s going to tweet something or
call you out on Twitter, or what the reaction is going to be, and I
think that’s too bad, because writing is about putting an idea into the
world, and letting it kind of sit there for a while and giving people a
chance to absorb it. If the blogosphere had been around when I was
starting off as a professional writer in the early '90s, I don’t know if
I would’ve taken some of the risks that I did. I definitely wrote
pieces that were very much the work of a young person and were just
deliberately polarizing and certainly, I never wrote anything that I
didn’t believe, but I was a very aggressive kind of writer.
And you also had the luxury of once it was off the newsstand —
— it went away forever.
Yeah, exactly. You didn't have it following you around every time you wrote something new.
Exactly,
exactly. Now, it's sort of at once disposable and nonbiodegradable, you
know? It's like everything that is written is kind of the equivalent of
Styrofoam.
I was going to say a plastic bag, yeah.
Yes,
right. I'm including myself in this. I'm saying, all of us when we
write on the web, it's Styrofoam. It's disposable; you don't need it
after five minutes, and yet it's never going to go away. It will never
break down and be reabsorbed. And that's a very different kind of
experience as a writer.
- The Cut interview, 2014
descensus Averno facilis est