The "something is wrong on the internet" cartoon is deeply funny, because the two phrases that precede it are so deadly true-to-life: "are you coming to bed?" and "no, this is imPORtant."
I've been on both sides of the cartoon more times than I can count, and know perfectly well how ridiculous my own earnest ramblings in pursuit of some fine point of truth or fairness can look.
I think I'm ridiculous myself. Who CARES about this bloody stuff, you know? It's a bunch of lonely/misfit/nerd/socially maladapted/obsessed/name-your-descriptor guys on the internet - the vast, anonymous, fullashit internet - you're never going to meet them, you're talking about goddam GUITARS fergawdsake, grow up and git a life, does this stuff really MATTER?
How much time, how many heartbeats, how many breaths is it worth? We're just addicted to seeing our words onscreen, right, we just have to keep posting to create some sense of identity?
That's all true enough stuff, and I see it all in me with a certain ironic detachment. The Gretsch Pages. So what.
It's just the internet, it's loaded with assholes and idiots and pompous posers, most of it is probably wrong anyway.
The thing is, the internet is just another expression of the whole bleeding human freaking race, where we meet and gather and contribute to what we must instinctively hope (against all reason and experience) is - or might, with enough effort become - a shared experience of a common reality.
We mock wikipedia because the experts are all self-appointed, they can edit each other without the supervising authority of an official editor, and we can all find some fault in any entry we actually know something about.
We read the comments of the General Public on news stories, and marvel at the ignorance, the illiteracy, the opinionated hogswaddle, the agendas, and - sometimes - the wisddom, insight, and balance.
And who should care about a single incoherent self-destructing review about some guitar we've never seen bearing the brand of some big company who only wants to sell us stuff and turn longing into loyalty anyway?
None of us should. It's all a crock.
I see all of that perfectly clearly.
Yet, at least some of the time, I find myself drawn back in as though it DID matter, as though the attempt to set some little irrelevant something-wrong-on-the-internet straight did have some value.
We also wonder what's the point of trying to set anything right in our homes, communities, workplaces, governments. "What, something's WRONG in the world? What's new? I'm supposed to DO something about it?"
Why bother with any of it?
The question is sincere, not rhetorical, and I know and feel in my bones both the cynical dismissive and defensive screw-it answer and the polyanna earnest do-it answer.
I wouldn't begin to suggest that all of us ought to answer the question the same way this time or all of the time, because I ain't offering any advice. Most of the time, I suspect how we respond to "things wrong" - or posts on the GDP - depends on our mood, how much time we have at the moment, what we think we know or feel about the poster, or some chance word or phrase in a post.
Sometimes we're screw-it, and sometimes we're do-it.
No, it doesn't much matter in the far scheme of things, from the internet to the world to the holy sprawling cosmos, that someone posts an apparently immortal bad review of a single guitar on some commercial website. None of our identities is really bound up in the guitar, or in flaming or defending its author.
It doesn't matter if the guy who started this thread, wondering if the review was accurate, buys a Gretsch or not.
Yes, we're ridiculous for spilling this many pixels, for exercising so many pulsing dendrons and overworked synapses on behalf of the whole silly thing.
It's also a little noble, all of us engaging to correct each other, dicing the matter ever finer, trying I think simply to get to some common understanding of thing, or at least to make sure that our own views are precisely known.
It's silly, of course
And it's just another way we be human, here on the internet as anywhere else we might meet.
And yeah, Ric, I've thought that it would probably be more productive to defuse that review in its original location, where it's undoubtedly seen by many more people than come here to ask about it.
Maybe I'll do that if no one else does, if I get in the mood to correct the internet again.
Without feeling as ridiculous as I'm completely aware it is!
