why snark works

May 25, 2010

The work of reaching out and explaining things is potentially dull and time-wasting; it’s just plain funnier and more exciting and more gratifying to be on the inside of shared assumptions. (We like talking to friends, not strangers.) The histories of a lot of message boards and comments boxes can be traced out along these lines: they begin with a few people earnestly explaining themselves to one another, finding common assumptions and common ground and welcoming newcomers; then they grow, and their shared assumptions solidify, and they get flip and concise and referential and giggle at newcomers who stumble in and Have to Ask.

And if flippancy is more fun then it’s also more attractive. Much like the coolest kid in middle school, it’s funny and it’s exclusive and it’s confident of being understood by just the right people—maybe even especially when it’s being superior and snarky and speaking at someone else’s expense. It can be so attractive, in fact, that you want to share its assumptions, whatever they are. It’s not addressing those assumptions, or earnestly explaining them to you in some dull droning unfunny voice, but you want to share them even more, because you aspire to be on the right side of the cool person’s joke. You might not even think about those assumptions, or notice yourself adopting them.

Nitsuh linked to one of his oldest posts today, and I had never read it, so I bookmarked it for later. When I did get around to reading it—just now—I found a fascinating bit about message boards hidden in the midst of the longer text (see above quote). This is particularly interesting to me because I spent the last six years intimately involved with a particular message board community, only to quit it abruptly a couple of months ago. I’d started posting there the day the message board was created, and so, over the course of the past six years, I was there to watch the evolution Nitsuh describes in the first of the quoted paragraphs happen in real time. When the board started, I thought it was amazing. It was pretty much the first place on the internet where I felt comfortable discussing ideas and opinions with other people, and a lot of that was because people seemed willing to explain themselves, and listen to the explanations of others. I’d always felt like a fish out of water in other message board communities—always typing long earnest replies where everyone else spit half-dozen word snark soundbites at each other. In the early days of that message board, I thought I’d found people like me, finally.

Maybe I did, too, because at least part of what changed the board over time was a steady turnover in regular contributors. It took a long time for the evolution into a more exclusive community, in which new arrivals could no longer just jump in and start talking, to occur. I think because it took so long, it was hard for me to notice it happening until it had been happening for a long time. But there came a point in the past year or so where I started to realize that I no longer felt all that comfortable on that message board. There were still people I liked who posted on it, but the overall tone frustrated me, and made me feel excluded. I took longer and longer breaks from posting there, and when even that didn’t help me enjoy the times when I did post, I quit entirely.

Until now, I don’t think I really understood why. But reading Nitsuh’s words earlier made something click into place inside my head. I think I’ve always known that there was a distinction between the way I communicate with people and the way most people communicate with each other. In other words, I’m weird. What, for a lot of people, is really appealing about becoming part of an exclusive community in which everyone has common ground and shared reference points, just makes me feel uncomfortable. When I see people on the inside of a circle of understanding, people sharing common ground and reference points that allow them to communicate in a method not understandable to outsiders, I don’t see the joy of being included in that. I see the pain that’s caused by being excluded. This is undoubtedly the product of my childhood; realistically, I think my parents’ decision to enroll me in school a year early, thus making me the smallest, least mature child in my class every year (at least until I hit high school and things started evening out, though by then the damage was done), put me in the position to be the kid that everyone picked on in class, especially since I was smart and precocious and under a lot of pressure from my parents to be not just a good but a standout student. I didn’t know how to rebel against that for a long time, so I spent my childhood being this little tiny kid who knew all the answers in class. My classmates found me insufferable, and believe me, I knew it. But my home life was stressful enough that social pressures I faced in school were never going to be able to counterbalance the ones I got from my parents.

My point is that I spent a lot of my formative years being excluded from any and every social interaction possible. That has had an effect on my perception of social groups that I have found impossible to escape. Even now, as an adult, I’m so bothered by exclusive behavior that, on the rare occasions when I find myself within a social circle that forces other people to Have To Ask, I always go out of my way to explain the inside jokes and be friendly to the kids who everyone else are calling “n00bz” or whatever. This gets me in trouble with the rest of the social circle, a lot of times, and I think that’s what was going on with that message board that I quit. It’s probably not all that was going on, but the things that I remember finding most frustrating had to do with the frequency with which snark and flippancy were now deployed, where at one time the board had been painfully earnest. I was more comfortable with the days when everyone was explaining themselves to outsiders who didn’t yet understand them. If Nitsuh’s right—and it feels to me like he is—for most people, those stages are intermediate ones, stages they go through on the way to developing a shorthand exclusive to that particular group, which can make them feel on the inside of something that most others are outside of. It makes them feel cool.

For years now, I’ve been emphasizing to people just how uncool I am. I found real resonance in the scene in Almost Famous in which the young, fictionalized version of writer/director Cameron Crowe calls up my real-life hero, Lester Bangs, and gets some advice from him. Here’s a partial transcript:

Lester Bangs: See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.
William Miller: Well, it was fun.
Lester Bangs: They make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You are not cool.
William Miller: I know. Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasnt.
Lester Bangs: Thats because we’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us—most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people dont have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter.
William Miller: I can really see that now.
Lester Bangs: Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love… and lets face it, you got a big head start.
William Miller: Im glad you were home.
Lester Bangs: Im always home. Im uncool.
William Miller: Me too!
Lester Bangs: The only true currency in this bankrupt world if what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.

I identify with that quote—even the parts that are uncomfortable. For reasons that, again, have to do with how I grew up, I don’t want to say anything about being smarter than anyone. And coming up with any sort of pseudo-legitimate excuse for my problems finding love always seems like a copout to me. So yeah, I can’t really own those parts, and yet I still can see myself in all of it.

Getting back to my point: when Lester says, “Friendship is the booze they feed you to make you feel like you belong,” I think about the circles of inclusion that form in online (and real-life) communities. There’s some implication in Crowe-by-way-of-Bangs’s quote that you don’t belong, that you never will. For a rock writer trying to interact with the world of rock stars, that’s an objective truth. But I find myself believing some version of that idea in the face of any community I might be part of. It always seems like a lie to me. Even when I know all the inside jokes, the fact that they are inside jokes reminds me that people are being excluded, and I can’t shake my perception that, whenever people are being excluded, one of those people must be me. So, when communities I’m part of get snarky, get flippant, start communicating in a personal shorthand that keeps other people from understanding, I can’t roll with it. I can’t enjoy it. I just feel uncomfortable, and often, I end up in arguments over the changing tone of the community—arguments that force me into exclusion, even when I wasn’t being excluded before. In the end, I always have to leave.

This isn’t intended to be an indictment of snark, flippancy, or creation of exclusive circles of friendship and social interaction. As I said a few paragraphs ago, I’m weird. I know this. But knowing I’m not like most people doesn’t make it any easier for me to be comfortable with their alternate methods of interaction. It’s only when I’m being earnest and emotive, when I’m getting everything I feel out in the open, that I feel comfortable. In my non-internet personal life, I’m the same way. I’m not big on small talk, I don’t like the sort of sarcastic, competitive jokes that make up the interactions of most typical “dudes,” and I tend to lose touch with casual acquaintances. I have a bunch of really good friends I can talk about anything with, and a shitload of people I don’t even know well enough to feel comfortable approaching them when I see them on the street. I’ve joked with friends of mine that I really am a person who hates fun, and while that’s not really true, it is close to the truth to say that I’m very uncomfortable with it. Any sort of “fun” that also involves social interactions with large groups seems to me like an occasion that could go horribly awry for me, and result in a group turning on me and excluding me in an extremely humiliating manner.

So I guess Nitsuh’s post actually has wide-ranging implications in my life, which I didn’t even realize when I started typing this. But the main thing I noticed when I first read it was how neatly it explains my discomfort with message boards that become too freighted with history and shared reference points. Maybe most people love being part of groups like that, but I find them uncomfortable, and can’t stand to be part of them for too long. And maybe that also explains why I am really bad with understanding and using sarcasm. Snark may make most people feel included and cool, but it makes me feel excluded, and I know I’ll never be cool.

10:16pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUaybkr1P

(Notes: 177)