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I don’t know whether Heffernan has ever done letters-to-the-editor duty, but I did, as a lowly intern well before the advent of widespread open commenting and closer-to-universal Web access, and… it wasn’t all that different. There was less–in terms of raw numbers–idiocy, but there’s no reason to attribute that to anything but the barrier of purchasing a postal stamp. And I don’t recall everyone freaking out about how the postal system was an embarrassment to mass communication. Let’s see newspapers start printing every letter they receive and we’ll get back to the question of the Web later.
Personally, I don’t care that online comments are terrible, and I think it might be for the best that they are. There are a lot of stupid, angry people in the world, and journalism, for better or worse, tries to pretend otherwise, perhaps because it’s virtually all predicated on the idea that people are sensible and want to listen to theoretically well-reasoned arguments. But it’s simply not the case; if Heffernan really wants to gaze into the void, she should read through the comments on virtually any YouTube video, no matter how innocuous, which almost inevitably dead-end into depressing bizarreness.
