Become A Published Author: Make A Comment

By Hanna

In a lot of “end of the year” lists for 2009, Twitter was listed as the Internet trend or website of the year. Another contender was Facebook, which has amusingly been included in “trends that won’t return next year” for about five years now. Although to most people who spend a lot of time online, Twitter had its trendy moment a few years back, and Facebook’s was around 2005, there remains this insistence that quite a lot of the Internet is just part of a fad or a trend.

Gutenberg Press

Obviously, specific websites and online services all have their moment of popularity, and trendiness does fade, but it seems fatuous to keep passing off entire communication systems as a trend of a certain year in a time when newspapers are bankrupting and magazines folding at a very high rate. The fact that these sites were actually trendy several years ago is only an ironic reminder.

Luckily, the Internet isn’t a novelty subject to everyone anymore. Some people have produced very interesting looks at how it has changed the face of publishing over the last years and may continue to do so as we move into a new year and (to some) a new decade.

One of these is Julie Hanus, whose “Join The Future of Publishing: Leave A Comment” article is significant because it doesn’t look at the rapidly transitive place of online publishing (be it Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, or what have you) that less observant articles focus on, but at actual online publishing, specifically: the comments. The article itself is, interestingly enough, a reaction to a blog about commenting by Kerry Skemp, entitled You’re Talking A Lot, But You’re Not Saying Anything.

It’s easy, and of course valid, to complain about the quality of commenting on the Internet, but as every YouTube browser and fanfiction writer knows, for every infuriating comment there’s a hilarious one, and for every flame there’s a comment telling you how much someone loved your story.

And the two aren’t exclusive: the hilarious comments aren’t always the intentional ones, the flattering comments don’t always say as much as the flames do, and the anonymity means more honesty as well as more viciousness. As Hanus and Skemp note, “The presence of nasty (or self-serving) commenters, for example, means that ‘the art of commentary includes determining what to weed out,’ a.k.a., a dose of media literacy.”

What is needed to use Internet comments properly is a critical ability that goes beyond that of the published newspaper or magazine.

After all, you can read Cosmo and get incredibly upset at sexism or horrible Photoshopping in their ads, but a letter detailing what bugs you about their publication isn’t even going to be published. One post on Photoshop Disasters or Jezebel , though, and you’re getting a real audience, who will have read what you have to say before they’ve even noticed they can send you a cease and desist letter.

While nobody obviously believes everything they read in a print publication, there is even more vigilance needed in reading Internet posts, and six times the vigilance when reading comments anywhere. And while someone can block you from commenting somewhere, they never pose a serious threat. Unless they’re /b/.

Criticism is healthy: both of what you read, and of what other people say. The more practice, the better, and the Internet offers you a lot more opportunities than any print publication can.