Comments Are Overrated

As I (and several others) have pointed out recently, there’s been a slow death of discourse in blogs.  Most commenters either agree with the author openly, disagree vehemently, or use the opportunity as a chance to pose their own pet theories (as a ploy to drive traffic to their own blogs).  What’s often missing is any critical evaluation of what the author actually wrote, or any discussion that adds further value to the post for the author or its readers.

Now I’m realizing the problem goes one step deeper: in many cases, blog commenters don’t even understand the post they’re commenting on.

What Women’s Tennis Can Teach Us About Inanity

Case in point: mere months after women’s tennis star Kim Clijsters returned to the court following a 2 year motherhood-induced absence from the sport, she managed to win the US Open, becoming the first mother in 30 years to do so.  Guardian UK columnist Anne Perkins summed up the general consensus about Clisters’s victory on her blog: half the populace is using it as vindication for working moms everywhere, while others see it as an (extreme) example of women forsaking their roles as mothers in order to cling to their own extra-parental identities.*

And yet, to see the comments on Perkins’s blog, you’d think her “readers” never actually read the article at all.

Instead, they misinterpret the examples Perkins uses in her article, admit that they don’t understand what she meant (and then digress wildly), and even accuse the author of making the very point that she explicitly speaks out against.  This doesn’t take into account the other commenters who simply call the article “rubbish” and its author an “intellectually limited feminist,” or who use their pixels to rant about motherhood, feminism, sexism, the state of child psychology in the UK or anything else that seems to be on their minds — as though any blog post on the web is really an excuse for anyone who wanders by to leave a tenuously-related comment.

Plays Unwell with Others

As much as I’d like to be amazed or irritated by this behavior, I’m not.  Staying on topic has never been a strong point of humanity, nor have we ever been particularly judicious with our fists, mouths or procreative organs.  Which makes me wonder… as with the state of social media in general, are we expecting too much of blog readers?

Time is tight, and most of us are lucky if anyone reads our blogs at all, much less leaves a comment.  Can people truly be expected to read, process and add to a conversation on their own time and of their own volition while simultaneously juggling a dozen other slightly-completed tasks?  Isn’t yet another stale “you’re absolutely right” or “you talentless idiot” better than nothing at all?

Should we bloggers (and blog readers) be thankful merely to be half-spammed?

And, if that’s the best we can do, why blog at all?  Why not just… write?  What good is catering to an audience if it doesn’t improve the experience?

Tags: blog, Blogging, comments, sports