Blogosphere, playground of the Id

At the moment there's a lively, interesting, well-informed discussion going on at Larvatus Prodeo about today's Melbourne Cup. And yesterday in the middle of it, someone popped up to say 'Oh, is there a horse race on this week?' or some such drecky smartarse remark.

It's reminded me of something very similar that happened (also at LP) a couple of weeks ago when a light-hearted Kasey Chambers Appreciation Post went up and in the middle of, again, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable discussion, someone suddenly turned up to say something like 'Oh, this is reminding me of the tedium of country music.'

Would these people walk up to a group of strangers at a party having exactly the same conversation and say exactly the same thing? Would they be aware that such behaviour is beyond the realms of the pig-rude? And if they wouldn't do it IRL, why do they do it online? I would really like to know what other people think this kind of behaviour is about.

I know what I think it's about; I think it's about the sort of wankery that's involved in implicitly declaring one's own superiority over the people discussing the topics, and, by extension, of all of the topics' enthusiasts. I wish I could say I think the mindset that goes 'I know nothing about this, therefore it must be crap' was a product of our times but I fear not; it seems rather to be a particularly unattractive aspect of the human condition, possibly enabled by educational fashions in recent years that have encouraged children to think self-expression is more important than anything else.

Now it's perfectly all right to be not interested in stuff. I myself break out in hives whenever people start talking about renovations. The difference is that I try not to rudely say so in the middle of an enthusiastic discussion of renovating, being conducted by people who are far more knowledgeable about it than I am.

With the LP threads as aforementioned, I feared for a while, before I'd thought this through a bit more, that there may be an unspoken and probably largely unconscious class dimension. Country music and horse racing are so, well, you know. On the other hand, for some reason people also feel compelled to behave in this way during discussions of Harry Potter, a topic I would not have picked first up as a signifier of boganville. He does, however, have mass appeal, so I suppose the expressions of contempt there are to do with the speaker's desire to express her/his own unique distinction from the common herd. It's really more about self-definition by disownership. People given to this kind of behaviour do seem to reserve a special virulence for particular topics, but those topics also include feminism, literary theory and opera.

These online expressions of contempt for other people's enthusiasms, right in those people's virtual faces, might be somehow related to road rage. Perhaps the de haut en bas dissers feel safe in the knowledge that they're not doing it face to face.

Which raises the question of the power of physical presence. Do people actually fear they will be hit or spat at if they behave like this in the real world? And if they do think that what they have to say might provoke physical assault, is this not an indication that they understand exactly how offensive they're being?

Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that they do not care. But if these people are so gosh-darned fussed about what other people think of them that they feel the need to express their superiority to a bunch of strangers, it's astonishing that they don't think twice about their manners.