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Out of context: Reply #34386
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That’s the recurring blind spot in the criticism of snark. Can it be nasty? Definitely. Is Perez Hilton a repugnant Horseman of the Apocalypse? You bet. Is snark scattershot in its application? Of course—all too often it’s applied like a clawhammer to the soft skulls of undeserving targets. Does the reflexive glibness practiced at certain outposts of the Internet (which, contrary to Denby’s sensationalism, flourish mainly in the niche of media and celebrity gossip; snarky blogs about economics, business, politics, and technology are the rare exceptions) produce, in the regular reader, a wearying hopelessness, building up in your system like mercury poisoning? Yes, I’m afraid it does—though no more so than the wearying hopelessness that might come from watching too much Nancy Grace.
Charges against snark are valid, especially when backed up with cherry-picked evidence. But you could make the same accusations against all strains of humor, throughout history, when misapplied. In targeting snark, Denby sights a trendy straw man, but he misses the important point that snark is not an idea; it’s a conduit—an outrage delivery device. He claims that snark is the favored voice of a generation “who know, by the time they are 12, the mechanics of hype, spin, and big money,” and about this, he’s exactly right. But instead of moving on to denounce the toxic pervasiveness of hype, spin, and big money, he blames the refuseniks who rail against it, claiming that everything seems “lifeless and unreal to them.”