Snark Culture

There’s a passage in Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (a work I highly recommend, by the way) that sums up how I’ve always felt about writers and writing. Weldon’s conceit, in her letters to an imaginary niece who has sought out the novelist’s help in reading literature for the first time, is that Austen and all writers, through the Houses of the Imagination that they’ve built, book by book, have created a City of Invention. Its inhabitants inform and influence each other; its architecture is rich and multi-layered, with its own hoity-toity neighborhoods and red-light districts. Weldon writes:

Writers are privileged visitors here. They have a house or two of their own in the City, after all. Perhaps even well-thought of, and nicely maintained; or perhaps never much reckoned and falling into disrepair. But to have a house of any kind, even to have brought it only to planning stage, and have given up in despair, is to realize more fully the wonder of the City, and to know how its houses are built: to know also that though one brick may look very much like another, and all builders go about their work in much the same way, some buildings will be good, some bad. And a very few, sometimes the least suspected, will last, and not crumble with the decades. Writers, builders, good or bad, recognizing these things, are usually polite to one another, and a great deal kinder than the people who visit as outsiders.

When I ran across this passage the other day, it got me thinking about something that’s bothered me increasingly throughout the last few years. It seems to me that lately the City of Invention has been overrun with a particular breed of tourist I despise—and let me make it plain here that in the City of Invention we are all tourists, writers and readers alike. Furthermore, I believe the City of Invention includes all the entertainments that feed our dreaming, including the scripted television series we love and the movies we see.

But there’s a particular breed of visitor to the City that bothers me increasingly, of late. They’re loud and shrill, and fill the streets with shouts and catcalls. Their hoots of derision as they drive by in their souped-up jalopies block out the usual civilized, mannered conversations to which its citizens are used. It’s the internet culture of snark that’s invaded, and its celebrants make me want to flee the City for good.

The culture of snark glories in its own cleverness. Its practitioners are like the catty bullies in the middle school lunch room who gather around the exit to the cafeteria line in order to rip to shreds anyone and everyone who steps into their line of sight. One of them sights a flaw, real or imagined, and the rest dogpile onto it, attacking with fangs exposed, until the victim manages to escape. Then they all congratulate themselves. They’ve done a fine job of savagery, yes indeed. They’ve cut that one down to size. But their hunger is never satisfied, because there’s always another target to come.

It’s easy to be snarky on the internet. There’s no real investment there, often no need to associate one’s name or face to the comments one posts. All one needs is the rallying cry of snark aficionados everywhere, Is it just me, or does anyone else think. . . ? And off they go.

Reading websites visited by those who love snark culture makes clear that they believe they are doing a service the books and shows and movies they rip apart; they are convinced they’re setting things straight, and reclaiming the Houses of the Imagination that are rightfully theirs. They know exactly how to fix 24 or Battlestar Galactica. They use the word Whedonesque as a weapon, thinking they know what’s more Whedonesque than Whedon himself. And the breed has its variants, including the well-meaning crusaders anxious to whip the world into a frenzy. If someone’s written a book about which it’s possible for the crusaders to be outraged, because the author’s built the world differently than the way it is or the way the crusaders believe it should be, they gang up and demand apologies. Puffed up and superior, all of the snark lovers kick and pummel until they imagine they’ve superseded anything the original builder could say, and they move on to the next victim.

They think they’re being constructive. I even suspect they think that the time they spend polishing their knives is time spent erecting their own houses within the City, shining and admired. But they aren’t. Snark doesn’t build anything. It only attempts to erode. It’s the antithesis of the creative act. It’s graffiti of the least colorful and artistic sort, drive-by sniping that’s designed to harm. Clever-clever it may try to be, but in reality it reworks the same tired old tropes, over and over again—the cute nicknames, the attempts to pinpoint the shark-jumping, the eye-rolling, and lately, adding the suffix -fail to whatever it can. On the internet they yell and point and laugh and shrill out any real dialogue, until it all echoes so loudly in their ears that when the ringing stops, they’re convinced that everyone must think like they do.

Never does it occur to its practitioners that there’s an entire vast world outside the internet, and many of them don’t agree, or care. I get tired of hearing the din, though. It makes my head hurt. It dismays me. Because on a fundamental level, I don’t understand how or why culture’s shifted to a point where a new House of Imagination doesn’t get to earn any derision or scorn; it’s automatically entitled to it. Even before the paint’s dry and the front door is open, the graffiti is often there; the snark lovers don’t even have to visit to render judgment.

Erecting fifteen little shanties of my own along the City of Invention’s streets does not give me any more privileges than anyone else visiting, let me say. I’m a tourist too. Often I turn up my nose at what’s been built, and I’ll say so. But like Weldon points out, having a few houses of my own makes me painfully aware of how much work and love goes into building them. When I see a crowd outside one, jeering for the sake of hearing their own voices, my sympathies are always going to be with their builders. No one wants to write a script to a chorus of naysayers who believe their know one’s characters better. No one cares to spend months or years on a book at which a few people are throwing rotten fruit in the hopes that everyone will follow suit. That’s too much time and imagination spent in a life that’s already too short.

I’m aware how old-fashioned I sound, but the City of Invention is thousands of years old, and deserves respect. There’s civilized conversation. And there’s dogpiling, disguised as it may be with righteous intent. Snark culture is built on the latter, and that’s why I steer as clear from it as I can.

See the City of Invention with opened eyes. Be a builder. That's the billboard I want to erect, right on the outskirts of town for everyone to see as they drive in.

Be a builder.