be good (or: the plague of snark)
Posted on February 26, 2009 by Tito
I think Roger Ebert’s blog may be the best thing going these days. Now another typically excellent essay in which he writes now is the time “to put away childish things” and “inspire more appreciation than ridicule”.
Snarking has been part of the air we breathe for a long time. It is said to have entered American pop culture in the 1950s, with Mad magazine, Stan Freberg, and so on. Not at all. They were practitioners of the honorable art of Satire. They exaggerated traits rather than punishing them. There was affection involved. Snarking has come into its own as a rhetorical style in this age of the internet. The web simultaneously allows anybody with a computer access to a worldwide audience, but the probability of complete invisibility. You can speak, but in a sea of so many words, no one will hear. You can win listeners by writing something worth reading, but you can win them more easily by snarking. When you snark the famous, you not only associate yourself with them, but propose yourself as their superior. This is so essential to the process that I have never observe the snarking of an unknown person.
» Filed Under Liberal Media Conspiracies, Pain
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