Confused misused strung out ones and worse

Mass-communication has a funny way of either spiraling out of control, or normalizing itself.*

I sometimes envy the bloggers who get loads and loads of comments.

Until I read a long thread, that is. As a commercial enterprise and well-known newspaper to boot, it's hardly surprising that some of the Guardian blogs gets loads of comments - particularly on threads involving pop music and books. Funny, eh? Who'd have thought that best-selling literature and popular music would have so many fans?

I was sceptical about blogging, when Roy suggested I try it. I believe in peer review, for example, however misguided that belief might be. I also think that having a human element moderating or pre-approving comments is the best way to keep things civil and relevant.

I'm not going to criticise people for commenting - that's one of the main things that makes blogs interesting, and I post comments myself - but there comes a certain point in any popular thread when a critical mass is reached, and only an insane person would be bothered to read them all.

This bothers me. First of all, there's a blog-post on a subject a lot of people find interesting; so interesting, that they want to go on talking about it among themselves. But second of all, when so many comments are posted, it becomes too obvious that an awful lot of people (a) don't understand what the discussion is supposed to be about; (b) cannot bear to live in a world in which anybody disagrees with them; and (c) are very, very concerned to prove something, like how clever they are. More than anything, what happens is that an interesting discussion quickly becomes boring.

Trolls are a well known internet thing. They've been around since the earliest days, since before the popularity of the WWW overtook things like Usenet. For some people, provoking a lot of reactions is a sport - though you wonder what possible pleasure there can be in it. Jack Schofield of The Guardian's Technology blog (which used to have a much better name - Online), is well known for posting up all the "bad news" about Apple he can possibly find, knowing that it will provoke a hail of outrage from Mac Moonies.

But although there are always the trolls, the threads referred to above, which get hundreds of comments, are less about that, and more about a kind of sad, one-sided discussion. Very few of the commenters talk to each other: most of them are just doing their own thing. On the Guardian's Culture Vulture discussion of "embarrassing comfort reads", I'd say only 50% of the people posting comments understood that the thread was supposed to be "embarrassing comfort reads" - in other words, they were posting things like, "I always re-read Jane Austen/Dickens" - or "I used to read a lot of Bertrand Russell." Pretentious? Moi?

(For the record, my own embarrassing comfort read is/was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I have come to realise is not an intellectual and philosophical powerhouse (it's just a best-seller, like Jilly Cooper's books are) - though I have more or less adopted it wholesale as my moral compass. I haven't read it for a few years, though there's always the chance I will.)

Apart from the people pretending to be embarrassed about non-embarrassing stuff (unless they really are embarrassed about being pseuds), there are the others, who join in about halfway down the thread, and start criticising other people's choices. These are the really stupendously stupid clever people who have so completely missed the point (admitting to embarrassingly trashy books you love to read) and also feel the need to insult the people who haven't. These are the people who adopt a smug look as they queue at the checkout in the supermarket that's about to close.

The whole thing is made worse for me on the follow-up thread, by the people who start adding comments about what they consider to be the best books. Not what the follow-up thread is about, not what the original thread was about: so not really very relevant at all. And, anyway, who cares? While it's fun to share other people's confessions about comfort reading, someone's dogged insistence, out of nowhere, on the definitive Great Book ("the best book ever written is Trainspotting"), is just extremely dull.

I just find it depressing, which I think probably makes me a misanthropist, but I can't help it. Being in the midst of a mixture of pretentiousness and obtuseness - people talking across, but not to, each other - makes me despair. We had a comment on GuitarGas last week, from someone who decided to take offence (on behalf of a corporation - because he/she works there?) at something I'd written. But it was only because he\she hadn't read/understood what I'd written in the first (and second) place. I despair because it feels like the world is full of these half-mad people who don't really understand what's going on, but want to start an argument about it anyway.

Under no circumstances should you attempt to correct these people.

I think it probably means that it doesn't really work for an organisation as big and as public as the Guardian to have blogs - unless they carefully avoid all mention of popular buzz topics. A smaller blog, with a smaller circle of readers, can probably cope with the odd person who doesn't get it, but a long thread on Culture Vulture is like an afternoon in a mental hospital.

*Comment on the Basecamp forum