New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen wrote a blog post about the “hideous subculture” of anonymous blog comments, in which he explores whether or not there is something we can do to improve the situation.

The argument for allowing readers to continue commenting without restriction is to preserve a free and healthy flow of ideas. But Cohen mentions that even the Times, a website with an ostensibly literate and thoughtful readership, censors its comments to exclude ‘personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence and SHOUTING.’ This seems to do nothing to compromise the healthy flow of ideas, as evidenced by the hundreds of comments which often accompany most Times articles and the spirited debates therein.

The first question for me is not What can we do about this?¹ but What is causing this?

In an attempt to promote interactivity in a way that is not too demanding of their readers, many websites have included quick and dirty polls, which say things like:

What do you think of Jessica Simpson’s new hair?
LOVE IT
HATE IT

Do you like Jennifer Aniston?
SHE’S MY FAVORITE
I HOPE SHE DROPS DEAD

This is the type of decision making and self-expression that most people on the internet are faced with every day. We have traded subtlety for directness, nuance for speed, and courtesy for unrestricted expression. As such, the majority of our population is losing the ability and the desire to contemplate the finer points of an issue, to seek out the grey.

We have grown accustomed to commenting about entities—a film, a book, a celebrity—not to the creators of those entities or to the entities themselves, but to a third party, which acts a buffer for our vitriol. When I tell People magazine that I hope a certain celebrity drops dead or that I think so-and-so’s new book is total crap, I am not expecting the celebrity or the author to ever see my remarks. In an environment where readers are often cut off from the objects of their preoccupation, readers are not encouraged to consider the full impact of their words. Anyone who writes online has experienced the pain of receiving hateful comments from readers who exist in this chronically disconnected state.

These explanations do not encapsulate the entire problem, but certainly if you put together a penchant for black and white thinking—something is either good or bad, someone should either be given an award or be killed—with a lack of consideration for the person about whom you are expressing your opinion, it creates a potentially destructive situation.

Further complicating the matter, Cohen includes a quote from the writer Katha Pollitt, almost as an aside, which states that ‘…women writers on the Internet receive vastly more hateful comments than male writers.’

This makes me wonder if vulnerability doesn’t play a part in people’s perceptions. Is it possible that we are drawn to online commenting because it is the one way in which we can get through to an otherwise impervious figure, someone whom we would otherwise have no means to contact? Is their online presence like the black joints of a Storm Trooper, the only place in their hard white shell that a bullet can penetrate? If that’s true than perhaps we are even more drawn to those we perceive as being the most vulnerable, which in this society includes women. Are they an easier target?

Does anyone have any insights into this they would like to share?
HELL, NO. I WOULDN’T COMMENT ON YOUR SITE IF IT WAS THE LAST SITE ON EARTH.
YES, READ MY COMMENT BELOW. THEN LET’S MOVE TO THE COUNTRY AND HAVE BABIES.

When I am worried or anxious, when things look particularly bleak, I watch really bad movies. I’m not talking about the good kind of bad movies. I mean total crap. I do this because I cannot drink¹ and am too much of a control freak for hard drugs.² Lately—what with the state of the world being as it is and the fact that I am separated from my love by 3,000 miles—I’ve been on a real bender: I have recently introduced horrifically bad television programming into my regimen.³

Last week, in a moment of dire need, I queued up the first episode of Leave It To Beaver on my shiny silver Macintosh. To my great surprise, it turned out to be wonderful. Really, truly wonderful. Each episode begins with Ward’s voiceover telling us what we will learn over the next thirty minutes. A moral!⁴ Imagine that.

The language alone will slay you. Whether it’s June, straightfaced, saying,”Ward, I’m very worried about the Beaver” or the Beav insulting one of his classmates: “Violet Rutherford drinks gutter water,” the language cannot be stopped.

The most incredible thing about the show for me, though, is the pace of the Cleavers’ life. They are not harried or overworked. They are not thinking about the next IPO or all the unread emails on their Blackberrys. June has time to pack the boys’ lunches in the morning and Ward has time to take them into the garage in the evening to teach them how to beat up their classmates. And it’s not just the Cleavers. Everyone in town has free time. When The Beav’s principal hears that Ward is under the weather, she takes it upon herself to send flowers over to the house. When his teacher wants to get a message home to June she types up a letter and sends it home with Beaver. People actually talk to each other and have meaningful human contact.

It leaves me to wonder: where did all our time go? Are we dawdling it away writing emails, updating our facebook statuses, and tweeting ourselves blind? Is it possible that all of the things we’ve designed to make our lives simpler are in fact adding to our burden?

I mentioned to someone⁵ a few months ago how much I hate talking on the phone and emailing, feeling constantly obliged to check messages. He asked me a very pointed question, “What would happen if you just stopped?”

Me: Come again?
Him: What would happen if you only checked your voicemail and email when you felt like it?
Me: I don’t understand.

My first reaction was an overwhelming panic: I would lose jobs! My family would be angry! No one would talk to me again!

But I’ve started thinking about it more seriously, about dropping out of the technological communication stream. I imagine checking emails once a week, voicemails twice a month. I imagine feeling like I do when I’m on vacation, when my mind is finally able to quiet down.

I wonder if I would regain some of that lost time that the Cleavers seem to be swimming in. There’s no doubt I would send and receive fewer phone calls, curt emails, and text messages from friends and family. But my hunch is that I would write more letters, spend more time with people in person, and enjoy my life more fully.

Anyone want to try it?

A friend of mine has been encouraging me for months to start marketing my writing. According to her, no one can find out about your work if you sit at home in your pajamas and never go outside or talk to anyone.

      ”But I don’t have anything to promote,” I told her. “The book’s not finished yet.”
      ”If you wait until you have something to promote, it will be too late. You need time to build up a following.”

I always wanted a following.

So I did what she told me. I signed up for Facebook. For Digg. For Red Room. For Twitter. ¹ And I have not done any writing since. It turns out that marketing your work is more time consuming than working on your work. But it has given me the chance to dip my toe in the sea of self promotion, a deep and terrifying place.

What I have seen is humbling. The world is awash in talented people who all seem to have more time to self promote and more moxie with which to do so than I. Some even have secondary blogs to promote their primary blogs, which in turn promote their radio show, which helps to keep their speaking engagement dance card full.

But I am just a writer, a person who can only figure out her place in the world by sitting in front of a typewriter for six hours a day. I am not particularly telegenic, my voice is not mellifluous, and I don’t thrive in a crowd. I have only one blog, and its sole purpose is to interest people in the things I find out while sitting in front of that typewriter.

So how does someone like me cut through the clutter? With so much content floating about it feels like a daunting task. I wonder if we aren’t approaching a state of supersaturation. I myself have become so consumed with building an audience that I sometimes find I have little energy to be a good audience for other interesting people I meet along the way.

It begs the question: Is our attempt to share our creative endeavors with as many people as possible having a paradoxical effect? Is the barrage of information numbing and narrowing all of our potential audiences? One can’t help but notice that in a time when it is easier to disseminate one’s work than ever, it is harder than ever to get people to notice it.

I discovered the word Retrotech on one of my favorite blogs. I have not been able to find a proper definition for it on the interwebs, but I don’t believe I need to; I reckon it means different things to different people.

For those of you who Tweet from your iPhones, Mac OS 10.5.3 is retrotech.

For my fellow Luddites and nostalgists, I offer my favorite examples of retrotech for your consideration:

IBM Selectric I
Pong
Handwritten letters
Tin can phone
Lite-Brite
Shrinky Dinks
Photo booths
Skeleton keys
Records on vinyl
Books

If you have any of your own to add, kindly letterpress them onto a sheet of papyrus and send them to me via post. Or you can leave a comment below (sigh).

I live in a bubble of my own creation. It is for the most part a peaceful, quiet, happy place filled with wonderful and inspiring people. It is impervious to golf. And to drama. And to folks who voted Republican in any of the last three presidential elections. It’s a good bubble.

I stay inside of it because it allows me to be optimistic in the face of everything that is going on in the world. Everyone is inherently good here inside my bubble, and they all have excellent grammar.

But sometimes the bubble makes me forget about what the world is really like and how distrustful and wary some of its inhabitants are of the rest of us. I just got the following email from a woman whose photo I starred as a favorite on Flickr:

Re: [Flickr] blocking you
hi, J.B.~
while i thank you for liking my work, i’m not willing to
have it saved by “collectors”.
sorry,
_____

I composed the following note back:

Hi ____,
I’m not exactly sure what your message is in reference to. I am a writer and am brand new to Flickr. I use it to find images that inspire me and awaken something in me that I want to write about.
I believe I recently starred a photo of yours that I found particularly beautiful and which spoke to me. I seem to have offended you or upset you by doing so, which is very unexpected and was of course never my intention.
Good luck to you in all of your artistic endeavors,
-J

As I clicked the send button, I was told by Flickr that I was unable to reply to her message because she has blocked my ability to contact her, to comment on her photos, and to favorite her photos. All this because I starred one of her pictures.

I believe that she looked at my profile and saw that I had not uploaded any photos of my own. She probably noted that I had starred quite a few photos and assumed that I was doing something untoward, like exposing myself to them or letting them listen to rap music. I don’t know.

It reminded me that there are people out there who view the world through disappointment colored glasses, who automatically assume the worst in people, and who are looking for anything that will confirm to them their suspicions, even if they have to make up the details themselves.

So I suppose she lives in her own little bubble just like I do. But if I had to bet on it, I’d say the food tastes better over here.

Flickr is a surrealist’s dream. I search for “dictionary,” I get a picture of a lion. Where’s Dali when you need a high five?

I recently became acquainted with the wonders of Flickr, ¹ where I searched through innumerable ² photos to create a library for this blog. To my surprise, the majority of the photos I loved had certain settings disabled, which made the photos visible, but very difficult to download. ³

I understand that photographers want to have control over their work, that they don’t want bloggers altering, adulterating, mangling, or making a general mockery of their photos–as well they shouldn’t–but doesn’t this reticence to share hinder the creative back-and-forth that propels our culture forward?

I’m reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde whom the NYTimes magazine profiled in an amazing article a few weeks ago. He believes that by treating art as an offering, that by circulating it, by allowing it to become part of a dialogue, its value increases far more than it ever could as a commodity. The more hands that touch a work of art the more precious it becomes. He is not saying that artists shouldn’t be compensated for their work or that they should give away all rights to it, but he makes the argument that our greed and our copyright and licensing laws have run amok.

I was listening to the commentary track of Forgetting Sarah Marshall the other day and the producer, Shauna Robertson, was talking about how much Paul Rudd, who plays a surf instructor in the movie, likes to ad lib. Every take is different with him. Unfortunately, in the take that made it into the film, Rudd says offhandedly, almost under his breath,  “Let’s go surfing now. Everybody’s learning how.” Robertson notes, her voice dripping with vitriol, that they ended up having to pay ten thousand dollars for the rights to use the Beach Boys’ lyrics in the movie. Ten thousand dollars for a two sentence throw away ad lib. This, I believe, is the kind of thing Hyde would take offense with.

I know what it means to be precious about one’s work. I become suicidal on the day I get edits back from an editor–She changed my semi colon to a comma?! Should I take my name off the piece? I don’t want my stuff hijacked by strangers anymore than the next guy. But the more I read Hyde’s book the more I see that my work, even in it’s most pristine form, isn’t adding to the conversation by sitting in a folder marked Brilliant on my desktop. Perhaps there is something to be said for putting oneself and one’s art and a little bit of one’s heart and soul, in whatever form that takes, out there.  And once it’s out there, there’s something to be said for  letting it go.

The internet has made it impossible to keep things to yourself. Information is everywhere. It is undeniable, unavoidable. Songs, movies, photos, articles, drawings can be downloaded in the click of a button, regardless of whether their creators want you to or not.

So if there is a certain inevitability to the uncontrolled dissemination and repurposing of information and art, what if we try something revolutionary. What if instead of calling it stealing, we call it sharing.