Comment Culture
How to turn a perfectly functioning audience into a perfectly dysfunctional town square in no time flat.
My decision to leave social media for email was shockingly easy. The decision whether or not to enable comments on my weekly Musings, however, was surprisingly difficult. As an artist-entrepreneur, there exists within me a perpetual conflict between the desire to create art with proper intention and the desire to effectively market something to a large audience. This conflict came to head over what might seem to be a relatively minor detail.
The marketer in me loves a good comment section, in all its chaotic glory. In fact, I wrote an entire chapter in my first book extolling its virtues with the title, “How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My YouTube Trolls.” The short version is that an open-to-all comment section functions as an ecosystem, in which a number of different commenter archetypes interact in a symbiotic manner that — by way of hacking engagement algorithms — elevates the subject that is being discussed to greater significance in the public sphere. If you can get past the fact that occasionally (and hopefully only occasionally) you will have to endure a bit of spam and some very pointed and nasty criticism of yourself and your work, I strongly recommend keeping comments turned “on” if your goal is to reach a larger audience or build a brand. The almighty algorithms that run the show love a good comment section, too, and tend to reward their owners with the manna of additional amplification (read as: free marketing).
Of course, this is no longer a novel recommendation, as it might have been in the early days of YouTube. Today, the manifestations of comment culture are all around us. We leave Yelp reviews for our favorite deli and least-favorite auto repair shop. We rate and review products on Amazon — in turn inviting other reviewers to meta-rate our own reviews as “helpful” or “not helpful.” On Facebook, we voice our opinions on everything from world events to last night’s reality TV drama. On Twitter, we voice our opinions on other people’s opinions. On news articles by famed journalists, essays by field experts and movies by acclaimed directors, a comment section always provides us with the ultimate power to have the last word. On the surface, comment culture appears to be the perfect digital reflection of our democratic ideals by giving everyone a voice, at all times.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some major drawbacks to our newfound ability to comment on anything and everything. There are no prerequisites to participation in an open comment section, save for perhaps having a working email address. In the Marketplace Of Things, no purchase is necessary to review an electric shaver’s effectiveness, and no visit necessary to review the ambience of a local coffeehouse. In the Marketplace Of Ideas, no rudimentary knowledge of the subject matter at hand is needed to refute an author’s talking points; in fact, even having read the article itself is not required before detailing the myriad of straw man reasons that said author is mistaken. In a more reasonable mode of communication, a lack of any of these prerequisites would lead the public to ignore or at least discount such ill-informed opinions; in comment culture, such opinions sometimes give birth to entire threads onto themselves.
Comment culture has also warped our own sense of agency and importance. The Very Online — which I would define as those that post updates to their personal social media daily — are now faced with a brand new social pressure to speak up on every major news item or fraught political debate that enters the public sphere. That they may not have the requisite knowledge to provide insightful commentary or recommend effective policy changes is of no consequence, nor is it of any consequence that they normally use social media to share photos of their latest baking projects and their pet Corgi; their mere presence online demands their participation in this great town square of non-experts. Those that choose not participate sometimes receive a shaming by the online equivalent of the “hall monitor” — that infamous elementary school role for students with a particularly authoritarian streak — who have been led to believe that “activism” is short for “actively shaming others.” These kind of bully tactics are not only socially destructive, but spectacularly short-sighted and counterproductive. Serious problems demand serious attention by serious people — not performative online gestures and impulsive policy and legislative ideas by those that fail to grasp the potential consequences that such proposed solutions might bring. Ultimately, comment culture continues to fail us because it does not offer true dialogue but instead performance, disguised as dialogue. No one is obligated to use social media to share their thoughts on anything. We would be much better served to spend a bit more of our time listening, anyway.
The vast majority of folks are well-meaning, of course, and I don’t necessarily blame those that have wandered into the town square, only to later find themselves swept up into the mob. Indeed, I think it is the town square itself that is making all of us a bit worse at communicating with one another. Not everything exists for a mass audience, and we shouldn’t pretend like it needs to, either. The idea that knowledge is not hierarchical — and prerequisites therefore unnecessary — may be attractive, but few of us would venture into a doctorate-level class on particle physics and expect to understand any of the material being presented. Similarly, few of us would eavesdrop on a complete stranger’s family dinner and expect to understand all of their inside jokes and references to distant relatives. In the real world, we implicitly understand that we are not the intended audience for every single thing.
We already use this understanding to inform our offline interactions with others. If I was to give a talk to a group of music majors at a college, I would naturally speak to them differently than I would to a larger audience comprised mostly of non-musicians. To the music majors, I could make a joke about the ubiquity of the “Canon in D” chord progression in pop music and get at least a few polite laughs; to a mass audience, however, I’d be better served limiting my comedy to a more mainstream pop culture reference. If I was later invited to tell my hilarious “Canon in D” joke — including my awesome Johann Pachelbel impersonation that I honed over several weeks’ worth of talks — on a late-night talk show with no further context given, it would surely fall flat. I would have failed the test of knowing my audience.
OK, the above hypothetical might be a bit farfetched; I know where my strengths lie, and comedy is not one of them. However, actual standup comedians are quite often faced with this conundrum, since knowing the audience plays such a crucial role in their art. Comedy — like music — is an art form that is essential for a healthy society; it helps us cope with tragedy and loss, challenges the status quo, and allow us all to take ourselves a little less seriously. A comedy club, then, is known to be a sacred place where nothing is sacred; if a comedian is genuinely funny and crafts their material well enough, they can venture into risky, controversial territory without alienating their audience. The comedian and their live crowds have built enough mutual trust to permit this; the audience typically understands what they have signed up for by attending, and the comedian can deliver jokes and satire without the fear of being labeled a horrible person. Of course, even at a comedy club, this contract between performer and audience can still be violated; unfunny, needlessly cruel insults and hateful material is generally not well-received by anyone.
Outside the walls of a comedy club, things are markedly different. Without the further context of a comedian’s set, individual jokes or punchlines might come off as offensive statements of belief. Sometimes, such out-of-context clips from a comedy set are shared across social media by fans (or non-fans) and provoke an uproar — because while the comedian may have built the requisite trust with their live audience, they have no such contract with random social media users. Many big-name comedians prohibit their audience from using their cell phones during shows for this reason — and rightfully so. Standup comedy is meant to exist solely as an opt-in art form; not something to be viewed against one’s will, nor broadcast to folks that are trawling the depths of the internet for something new to be outraged over. Make no mistake: there is nothing wrong with engaging with and critiquing a comedian’s work, or finding it to be offensive or even reprehensible. There is, however, something very wrong with someone using a brief, out-of-context clip as a justification to attack a comedian’s moral character. Like the nosy diner eavesdropping on the family in the next booth, such a person can not rightfully consider themselves to be a member of the comedian’s audience.
This courtesy should extend beyond comedians to all of us, as well. We have our private lives and our public lives, and traditionally, they have always been treated as separate entities. However, the social media revolution has forced us all onto a strange reality TV drama against our will; for an example of just how strange this can get, witness the tale of “Couch Guy” — a college student that became the unwitting subject of a massive, social media-led and media-followed investigation into his private life, simply because he didn’t appear to react with enough exuberance upon seeing his long-distance girlfriend surprise him at his school in a TikTok video (sadly, I am not making this up). Although TikTok’s social-media-on-steroids algorithm may have provided the spark, it was comment culture that dumped fuel on the whole non-event, turning it into a chilling conflagration. Nowadays, we don’t always know if we’re interacting with the people in the room, or with the world at large. This isn’t a sustainable model for a healthy society; we need to take a big step back and start building trust with one another, once more. We don’t need any more people weighing in on products they didn’t buy, articles they didn’t read, comedy acts they didn’t see, or long-distance relationships they weren’t privy to. Like the comedians, we need more studio audiences and less town squares in our own lives, too.
Luckily for me, I’m not planning on embarrassing myself with any comedic riffs on “Canon in D” in this newsletter. And I’m certainly not planning on insulting or offending anyone (although some may no doubt be offended by this 2,000 word treatise on what most would consider to be a relatively mundane subject). However, even if a comment section might ultimately expand my reach, my goals with this newsletter are slightly different than my goals with my music. I’m not trying to build the biggest possible audience for this newsletter; I’m trying to find the best possible way to communicate with my readers. As of now, I believe those two things are — sadly for the entrepreneur in me — mutually exclusive. Attaching an open-to-all comment section to these articles might increase their reach, but it would also inevitably mean losing the intimacy and trust required for genuine conversation and discussion of ideas. It would turn this into yet another frustrating conversation with the entire world at once — one of my chief complaints about social media. Not coincidentally, there is also no shortage of cautionary tales about writers and other public figures who spent so much time engaging with their Twitter mentions — some of whom could very well be bots and other fake accounts — that it affected the nature of their output; “Audience Capture” is a very real phenomenon, indeed.
For now, I invite you to continue to write me directly by responding to this email — especially if you have a great idea for another way that I can incorporate reader responses to these pieces and foster a sense of community. Who knows; it may already be possible to build a better comment section — and the very fact that you have made it this far in the article may be taken as proof of your suitability for participating in such a forum — but I think I’ll continue receiving your feedback via email for the time being, if only to buck the algorithm in some small way. I’ve been enjoying this old-fashioned communication as this small community of readers slowly grows; it brings to mind the bygone days of newspaper columns, call-in shows, and the rapidly-disappearing phenomenon of face-to-face conversation. So, for now, I’m sticking with the comment-free life, writing solely for (and to) you, my kind and very thoughtful audience.
-SB