Excess of Snark
[posted by Callimachus]
I tried to read a page of Atrios today. It was impossible. The writing is so coded, so terse, so self-referential, so masturbatory with in-jokes and snide asides to the regulars, so tilted toward the ironic instead of the literal, that "Atrios" seems to me to now qualify as its own language. It is hived off and sealed from the mainstream, and deliberately so: More support for the suggestion (which actually was made proudly on an Atrios-like blog) that the oppositional leftish anti-administration/anti-war blog crew really fancies itself the cool, artsy kids occupying their one table off in a corner of the high school cafeteria. There they all sat, convinced they were alone because they were exclusive, not because everyone else found them, in one way or another, insufferable.
That is where reliance on snark will get you.
I tried to read a page of Atrios today. It was impossible. The writing is so coded, so terse, so self-referential, so masturbatory with in-jokes and snide asides to the regulars, so tilted toward the ironic instead of the literal, that "Atrios" seems to me to now qualify as its own language. It is hived off and sealed from the mainstream, and deliberately so: More support for the suggestion (which actually was made proudly on an Atrios-like blog) that the oppositional leftish anti-administration/anti-war blog crew really fancies itself the cool, artsy kids occupying their one table off in a corner of the high school cafeteria. There they all sat, convinced they were alone because they were exclusive, not because everyone else found them, in one way or another, insufferable.
That is where reliance on snark will get you.
Labels: Snark
