![]() ![]() ![]() This seems obvious enough, but it tends to get lost in the noise of constant conversation, all the commenting and cross-posting, the tiny feuds and insignificant disputes. What Denby’s really talking about is consciousness, the idea that writers, thinkers, commentators ought to have a point of view. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don’t stand for anything, push for anything they’re mere opportunists without dedication, and they don’t win any victories.” “The trouble with today’s snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs,” Denby notes, in a snarky aside of his own, “is that they don’t go far enough they don’t have a coherent view of life. What makes this new paradigm so exciting, after all, is what makes it so unsettling: that we can respond to anything instantaneously, almost without thinking, Twittering and posting and YouTubing in an endless monologue, like Joyce’s stream of consciousness run amok. These are excellent questions, the kind any thinking person ought to be asking as the top-down authority of traditional media yields to the fluidity of the electronic frontier. “We are in a shaky moment,” Denby writes, “a moment of transition, and I think it’s reasonable to ask: What are we doing to ourselves? What kind of journalistic culture do we want?. ![]() “Snark” aspires to make a counter-argument: that the culture of mean, as exemplified by Gawker, TMZ and Perez Hilton, is not just idiotic but a dehumanizing force. The New York-based media gossip website, which launched in 2002 and has distinguished itself by, among other things, attacking writer Neal Pollack’s young son, Elijah, is generally regarded as the prototype of a new style of cultural discourse: dismissive, superior, jaded, marked by what David Denby, in “Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation,” calls “false knowingness,” a way of pretending to be more clued-in than it is.ĭenby quotes Gawker founder Nick Denton: “The ideal Gawker item is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head, and it’s 100 words long, 200 max.” This, Denby continues, is “snark’s mission statement - indolent parasitism as a work ethos.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |