Fix the World Week: Don’t Be Snarky Unless You Can Act and Talk Like an Adult

Welcome to Fix the World Week. Each entry this week will be devoted to making the world a better place.

For me.

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One of the worst things about the Internet is that it’s convinced every single person that s/he is the most clever, exceptional, interesting personin the world. Twitter and the comments sections of news articles and blogs are filled with elitists without a pedigree, intellectuals without the intellect, and expert swimmers who have never been in a pool.

Worst of all, they’re really shitty about it.

A recent article from Scott Jordan Harris for The Telegraph (Let’s Drag Film Criticism Out of the Snark Ages) pretty much sums up my frustration with unnecessary and particularly undeserved snark.

Here are some situations where you cannot and should not get snarky:

• You are making a statement or declaring something a fact that you actually aren’t certain about.
• You use “FAIL!”
• You end your own statements with “lol”
• You shorten “you” to “u”, “your” to “ur” or any other type of unnecessary shorthand.
• You’re deferring to authority and/or text that was written thousands of years ago by some guy that was just making that shit up as he went along.
• Implementation of any other form of logical fallacy.
• You have the word “dude” in your handle.

Note that I said some. There are many other scenarios where snark is not only inappropriate but can actually be self-defeating or embarrassing for you to use.

The long and the short of it is this: if you’re going to use snark, please exercise caution. Ask yourself “am I actually clever enough to be employing the use of snark in this scenario?” Because you’re probably not, and you’ll just anger people. After all, there are few things worse in this world than the willfully ignorant and the idiot who has himself convinced he’s anything but.