Comments on: Let Us Entertain You

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:37:03 +0000

"rather than 'What a maroon.'" Depends on how good your Bugs Bunny impression is... At any rate, TNH is your friend on thinking about maintaining good conversations. Proverbial money quote: "Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden."

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 13:33:33 +0000

I think this is nicely put, Robert–that what we should be trying to encourage is “free-ranging curiosity”. So on first encounter with someone else’s candor, you want to say, “Who is this person, and why is he saying what he’s saying”, rather than “What a maroon”.

By: Robert Zimmerman

Robert Zimmerman — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:45:17 +0000

Speaking of dumb, I sound pretty dumb seeming to question the obvious difference between bloggers and commenters. In the context of the post I was criticizing the distinction is questionable, and in general a blog is not just the blogger’s posts, especially if it collects a distinctive “commentariat.”

By: Robert Zimmerman

Robert Zimmerman — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:28:40 +0000

It’s kind of a tragedy-of-the-commons situation–the opportunistic over-exploitation of candor. My feeling is that unless it’s purely self-serving, there’s some generosity in every act of candor, even when it’s also foolish or obnoxious. But it makes for such a tempting target. I suspect there’s a close inverse relationship between curiosity and the tendency to treat honesty like Harmon’s as an opportunity to get out the “rhetorical torches and pitchforks.” The curious reaction is “why is this person saying this and what does it mean about…” as opposed to “what kind of dope would say that.” One of the more discouraging things about teaching undergraduates is that it often seems like genuine free-ranging curiosity is more the exception than the rule. So we’re probably stuck with the dynamic in cyberspace and people will just learn to keep their shields up or be anonymous.

There must be smarter and better ways to handle comments than treating them as a free-speech wild west, filtering out only the blatantly offensive or off-topic. The comment threads can contribute quite a bit to the character and impact of a blog, so it seems to me that bloggers should take more responsibility for their tone. It’s not obvious how that could be done in practice, especially for high-traffic sites where moderating or reacting to every comment would be an onerous job. But to not at least step in now and then and counter some of the dumb things people say (even people who are on your side of a debate) is to cater to dumb people–and they start to collect. A while back I wrote about my one dip into the Volokh Conspiracy, looking at a post that made a point of distinguishing bloggers from commenters–a distinction that I find questionable in general, and when I got to the comments on the post it seemed self-serving, too. The knee-jerk mentality was no credit to a blog written by law professors (the thread about Harmon is, by comparison, the soul of urbanity). And the post itself was like a comment in a multi-blog comment thread that was also locked in the kind of feedback loop you describe.

It’s fascinating to see the fault lines of an unfamiliar genre, though. Scripts vs. story boards? It seems to have some of the moral overtones that serialism vs. tonality used to have not so long ago for composers, except the tension is across a division of labor. So maybe it’s more like a struggle between composers and lyricists over whether the words or music comes first, except that’s not a contentious issue. But then songwriting isn’t such an drawn-out expensive industrial process. Definitely something to think about next time I watch Spongbob with one of my daughters.

By: Jmayhew

Jmayhew — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:17:51 +0000

Harmon was not really misquoted, was he? The excerpts from what he said were long enough so that their effect was really quite close to that in the original context. Now it seems like he not only doesn’t know how cartoons are made, but also doesn’t know how the internet works. He thinks he gets to control the context in which his words are read. Maybe he won’t get hired by the next hollywood producer who isn’t too keen on being criticized, but that’s pretty much his own doing.

By: William Benzon

William Benzon — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:33:39 +0000

I was a bit surprised about the Harmon thing. I’d read his comments (on his own blog) two or three weeks ago. Don’t remember exactly how I came to them, either a direct link from the Brew or a two or three links away from the Brew. I thought his comments were interesting and reasonable. So I was surprised at the way the Brew set him up this time around.

OTOH, as you know, the animation blogosphere has been having running battles about scripts vs. story boards and their importance in the process. Maybe we’re in for yet another skirmish.