masked & anonymous

Imagine you're on your death bed, or perhaps a silent observer at your own memorial service. All your friends and family members are gathered around talking about what a kind and considerate person you were, when all of a sudden large strips of paper with clear, block lettering come blowing in from the side. At first they look like oversized fortune cookie messages, but instead of fortunes, they contain something totally different: the full text of every anonymous comment you've ever posted.

While I conceived this particular scenario as a Dickensonian episode faced by a spiteful anonymous commenter, anonymous comments are often viewed as a nightmare by today's writers, who see their stories get flooded with hateful, racist, sexist, xenophobic, idiotic, or just plain mean-spirited remarks.

I used to be turned off and grossed out by anonymous comments on stories at kansascity.com or TKC, but I eventually learned to accept them as just being part of today's public discourse.

Lively comments sections have without a doubt changed the face of news. Where the writer or editor once had the last word on a subject, news stories, opinion columns and blog posts are now merely an introduction to what often winds up being a long, involved, heated (and occasionally quite ugly) conversation. If a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself, as Arthur Miller once said, than a good blog is a series of confederacies shouting, flinging poop and pulling each others' hair.

No matter what you think about anonymous comments, they're not going away. Nor should they, says former Washington Post editor Doug Feaver, who posted an excellent column about the subject today. An excerpt:

I believe that it is useful to be reminded bluntly that the dark forces are out there and that it is too easy to forget that truth by imposing rules that obscure it. As Oscar Wilde wrote in a different context, "Man is least in himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

Too many of us like to think that we have made great progress in human relations and that little remains to be done. Unmoderated comments provide an antidote to such ridiculous conclusions. It's not like the rest of us don't know those words and hear them occasionally, depending on where we choose to tread, but most of us don't want to have to confront them.

So there may be a social value in comments after all. They tear through the comfortable reality we've built up for ourselves and prevent us from believing that people are better than they really are.

In time, people might develop a sense of civility in their online commenting, though I think that's no more likely than the ghost story I began this post with. Another possibility is that readers will begin to assign more weight to comments that are signed by their authors.

For those who can't stand the vitriol and would prefer to believe that people are essentially good-hearted and tolerant creatures, the best thing to do is to just ignore reader comments altogether.

But really, what fun would that be?