A More Somber Outing, Please

David Denby offers his view of the Internet's weakness:

No one goes on the Web to somberly, soberly complain about his neighbor, or so-and-so’s love affair, or the guy down the dorm hallway who’s a closet homosexual. It all snarkily written.

So it's ok to complain about someone's closetedness as long as you do it soberly and somberly, but not if you add some vulgar epithet to spice it up. Would you wanna live down the hall from Denby? It does seem to me that distilled snark, or writing that does very little but snark, wears on the nerves after a while and dulls the brain. But removing snark from contemporary writing, or from blogs, in some lugubrious patronizing effort to maintain a respectable tone, would be a horrible denouement for the web, and mercifully, cannot happen. The tone police do not have the leverage in the blogosphere that they used to have in the dusty, elevated corridors of the old New Yorker. Power now is bottom-up, not top-down.

One should never forget how the Internet has robbed writers like Denby of a great deal of exclusiveness, status and power. They're angry and confused, which is why they write diatribes as stupid as Denby's. Walter Kirn says everything else that's necessary - but the factual errors, commission of sins he denounces in others, sad attempts at ginning up controversy on the Internets, and tedious, arch, poseur-ish title headings round out the picture.