We still need a sarcasm font...
Literal twitter may be the funniest twitter, but it can also be the meanest twitter
There was a time, not all that long ago, when the biggest flame wars took place on different messageboards (and there was a time when they took place on Usenet). I was a member of some messageboards and—believe it or not—took part in some of these flame wars (a flame war, for those unaware, is a off-topic argument in a discussion that is more about winding people up than it is about any actual thing of substance). However, a deep dive into many of these back-and-forths would reveal that, more often than not, they are products of simple misunderstandings coupled with the general tendency people have towards stubbornness, especially when there’s no cost for being stubborn (and there’s no place where it’s easier to be stubborn than the internet).
What I mean by the above is that these flame wars often start when one person makes a sarcastic or facetious comment that other take as serious and respond to as such, oftentimes in mean or obnoxious ways because they thought the other person was being mean or obnoxious. From there, the original poster or someone else mocks this response—for misconstruing the intent and being nasty about it—and the flame war begins in earnest, with neither side willing to back down, because they think the other side is horribly wrong. Ultimately, this leads to personal insults and even threats of physical violence, particularly form men with “internet muscles.”
On a messageboard I used to frequent, where flame wars would break out from time to time, someone once noted that what the board really needed was a “sarcasm font,” a way to indicate someone was being sarcastic with their response. Lacking such a thing, some would use “/s” at the end of a post to indicate it was supposed to be sarcastic, satirical, ironic, or otherwise not literally serious. Of course, the purists out there—like me—would argue that always doing this, always explicitly noting the use of sarcasm or the like, minimizes its impact.
The problem is, however, that the democratization of the internet has lead to a reality that I have, myself, often noted: irony is dead. I mean this figuratively, of course. Irony is not really dead, it’s just comatose. And that’s because there are just too many clueless people on the internet. They see only the literal reading of a comment, and judge accordingly, often replying in a mean or obnoxious way, which again only entices others to do the same.
What set me off on this road today was a comment on twitter to a comment I made. Someone whom I follow noted that twitter had marked a tweet as potentially problematic because it had the word “cracker” in it (“cracker” can sometimes be considered an ethnic slur). She noted this as a means of highlighting one of the pitfalls of content moderation by platforms like twitter. Here’s the tweet:
Someone then responded to that post, asking the person if she “had ever been to a Cracker Barrel.” Clearly, this was not a serious question. And I responded to it with a joking comment:
Okay, maybe it’s not brilliantly funny, but I think it’s a little funny. Regardless, it certainly was mean-spirited in any way. But someone responded to it with the following (sic):
Maybe do some research - “The phrase “cracker-barrel” was inspired by the barrels full of soda crackers that were for sale in the country’s country stores.
He seems to be serious. And he seems to think I was being serious. In my younger days, I would probably have responded with something like “Maybe find someone to loan you a sense of humor, idiot.” And that probably would have elicited a response from him—or someone else—that went something like “Maybe say something that’s actually funny first, douchebag.” And viola, we have the beginnings of a flame war! And over what? Essentially nothing.
But see, what drives commentary on the internet—especially on twitter and social media in general—is the need to win these kinds of pointless exchanges. I opted to not reply in this case, at all, though I came close to just posting a more innocuous “thanks but I was just joking.” But even that might have led to an obnoxious retort, because the reality is that I have no idea who I am talking to. It might be someone who really thought I was being serious, but was replying to be helpful and I’m misreading the reply as fundamentally obnoxious. It’s also possible that the person was not being serious at all, but was subtly mocking other people who use the “do some research” line, but who are actually clueless. This seems unlikely to me, but it’s far from impossible.
Similarly, I could be selling this person short. If I replied with “I was just joking,” perhaps he would simply say something like “ah, sorry, didn’t realize it.” Or perhaps he wouldn’t reply at all, since there’s nothing more that would actually need to be said, that would advance a meaningless back and forth into something meaningful. And this last bit is the thing. There are so many back and forths on social media now, so many arguments, and most of them just aren’t meaningful. They are, in fact, stupid. Yet, so few people seem willing to give an inch, to not reply even when there is nothing useful to say. They’re particularly not willing to give an inch when they’ve misread the tone of someone else’s statement, when they’ve taken something as literal when it was never intended to be such. For instance, here’s a comment from writer Thomas Chatterton Williams quoting Christopher Hitchens that is clearly not supposed to be taken literally:
It is, in my view, a great quote. And it can be applied to many different scenarios. But read the replies. Some are stunning in their abject stupidity, in their apparent misunderstanding of the Hitchens quote or at least in their need to show that it’s not always literally true. Williams—to his credit—doesn’t mock them. I don’t know if I could have resisted, to be honest. But again, that’s the internet these days.
I would argue that this reality, these constant misunderstandings of what people are saying and/or the tone of what they are saying, tends to make people more belligerent on social media than they would otherwise be in real life (thought I also think there’s a feedback loop here, wherein peoples’ online personas have begin to influence their real life personas in quite negative ways). And I would argue that—again—this is a consequence of the democratization of the internet, of the fact that there are just so many people on social media and that so many of them just suck at processing what people are saying, at recognizing the intent behind a lot of what is said. I have no solutions for this problem, apart from maybe having people take reading comprehension and IQ tests before being allowed on the internet. Really, those who fail should also be barred from voting, if not simply put to death or sold China to work in the coal mines.
Maybe they should be put in a barrel and shot.