1970s comment sections

See what this passage from Dave Barry’s recent memoir Class Clown in which he recounts his experiences working at a local daily newspaper as a young reporter in the early 1970s reminds you of:

“I also learned a lot about what readers of a local newspaper are, and are not, interested in. You could make a major mistake in a story about a meeting of a zoning board and never hear a peep from the readers about it. But if you, in writing a photo caption, misidentified a goose as a duck (I did this), you would hear about it from literally dozens of readers, some of them quite irate. And if the newspaper should ever—God forbid—leave out the daily horoscope, the phones would not stop ringing.”

I’ve given it away in the title of this post, of course, but this reminds me of nothing so much as trying to communicate on the internet. Majoring on the minors, mindlessly angry criticism, even astrology—there is nothing new under the sun. And there’s that famous bit of internet advice that, if in need of information, you shouldn’t directly ask for it, but instead make an incorrect assertion on the topic and watch the corrections pour in from the Actually guys.

Just in case we forget that technology seldom introduces entirely new bad behavior, it just amplifies it. And Barry has tons and tons of these stories.

Class Clown is a great read, by the way—funny throughout, often moving, it offers both a fun capsule overview of Barry’s life and about fifty years of journalism and culture.