Why snark works
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agrammar.tumblr.com
And this is why snark "works" -- people only care about socializing, not learning or persuading. Snark "works" by reinforcing commonality, stigmatizing difference, and turning disagreement into rivalry. Snark "works" if you're interested in the distinction between "people like me" and "people unlike me" rather than the distinction between your ideas and someone else's ideas. It doesn't work at all if you want to communicate constructively with people who have fundamentally different or alien ideas.
EDIT: I guess I didn't say anything very different from him, but I thought he glossed over the negative aspects pretty quickly. He characterizes snark as an ugly way of bullying people close to you, he says it is "quite possibly a really bad thing and a really bad habit," but he's clearly looking forward to using it. Creepy.
> Flippancy is more fun. 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.
He has it completely backwards - standard internet sarcasm is incredibly boring and repetitive. It's sad when a good site gets popular and the same cliched rudeness and snark replaces and pushes out the good and thoughtful discussion.
Maybe only thoughtful discussions can be had when a group is limited to a certain size and status is defined by the most original discussions. Not by the most accepted.
It's a part of it - is regarded as cool to be angsty and defiant. When someone doesn't actually have intelligent points, they can just make the same joke they read about in the newspaper or heard a comedian say.
> Maybe only thoughtful discussions can be had when a group is limited to a certain size...
I think this is more true with men than women - I think men jockey for status a little more.
> ...and status is defined by the most original discussions
Either that, or a clearly defined hierarchy. If it's clear who is in charge and there's mutual respect, there's no status jockeying. It's when it's not clear who is in a leadership role or there's not mutual respect that you get the most of it. Anonymity only makes that worse.
- Not sure I agree with your comment about women vs men with status. I believe that no matter what the information is, the social dynamic is different given a smaller group/context. It helps all of us narrow the focus.
- No clue why I keep hearing this love of hierarchy, respect and accountability. Whats wrong with just having something worth talking about? I think we all have a voice, maybe not the best tools to deliver it. But I think that's our job. :)
I hadn't thought of it in terms of convincing people - of having arguments and assumptions accepted, often without any opposition, because the conscious barriers are circumvented. Advertising uses this (especially sports-star endorsement). It's not just a sense of "getting it" and belonging/being accepted - it's also values and beliefs being changed.
Incidentally, peer pressure was experimentally confirmed in the famous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
EDIT the problem with sacrificing objectivity for a sense of belonging is that you don't see things quite as they are, so you have less ability to make a difference. You can't hack "magic" (there's my in-group reference). But in any group, people will try to conform unconsciously - the stubbornness of Establishment scientists (putatively truth-seekers) is a well-known trope; even here, HackerNews has some cult-like qualities (the "pg cult").
The problem of going the other way is that you sacrifice a sense of belonging for the sake of objectivity - an inhumanly cold choice. And you can't do it fully, anyway.
How do we agree as a group and yet continue to think independently? We have to agree on some things...right?
These also carry assumptions and biases within them. Often, breakthroughs come along with new notation or terminology - a new conceptual way to reason and talk about the subject - that the existing language "taught away" from.
But communication is also important for seeing more, and having more objectivity, by getting new points of view. Just being aware of the subjectivity is probably the best we can do in practice.
Besides if you don't use direct references you have to rely on assumptions. Which makes us all speak babble.