Fair warning: The following blog post may contain sensitive material, offensive to you or someone you know. If you are the type to be easily irritated or displeased by others' random thoughts and opinions, then please do not continue reading.
Wait – that was just a joke! Sorta kinda. Oh my god, should I throw in some smiley faces so that people know I'm just being flippant??? :o) :^^) :)
Recently I've been noticing a lot of drama in blogland. It's probably just because the amount of blogs I've been perusing is proportional to the amount of time I'm wasting at work, but I've been seeing so many nasty comments and preachy diatribes posted by complete strangers in reply to others who've commented, and sometimes, directed even to the blog creators themselves! About a whole slew of things. Like the mommy blogger who wrote about how she didn't think her newborn baby was the cutest in the world, that she thought her baby was average. This spawned a whole dialogue from offended, angry readers about the downfall of society and the propagation of materialistic, superficial, unattainable beauty. Really??
Or the Anthroholic blogger who is sponsoring a styling challenge with a $25 gift card to Anthropologie, where readers could vote on their favorite look amongst the finalists. When Kim wrote an updated post explaining that the anonymous poll mechanism faultily allowed unlimited voting, she removed the poll and instead asked readers to recast their votes using the Comments section to ensure fairness and only one vote per reader. She was berated – absolutely blasted – by a few readers who (WTF!) believed she deleted the poll because one contestant was receiving the sheer majority of votes thus far, and that she favored another contestant who was losing. Why would she even bother sponsoring a contest if she cared to play favorites? How does one even come up with such logic?
And then today. Today my friend Maya spotlighted on her blog a beautiful arts and craft product called feltidermy by Etsy seller girlsavage. (WAIT – did I do this right? Did I give due credit to the artist? Pffffffff!)
I commented to Maya that I love feltidermy, and how I'm going to splurge on a few of these when I have a baby for the room, adding "well, okay, they're very expensive so I'm going to have to find someone who can sew one for me instead!". A random reader then came back with a dissertation, I kid you not, about how it's theft when you steal an artist's idea, that I should save up instead, and how I should uphold the integrity of the artisan community.
Maya is my dear friend, so any comments I make on her blog have a personal meaning and she (I hope) gets my tone, whether it be sarcasm or wry humor, or whatever good-natured effect I was going for.
While I don't feel it necessary to defend myself to a complete stranger, I couldn't let this poor person walk around sounding stupid in life, so I did clarify that 1) you can't copyright ideas, and 2) it's technically stealing and illegal if you profit by replicating someone else's product. 'Cuz last time I checked, if your Grams saw something cool on tv and can sew up something similar to give you, that ain't a crime.
I guess my real question is, do people take blogs too seriously? I suppose that's why I keep my own very light (hence all the stupid posts about what I'm wearing), and basically a recount of my day-to-day adventures, so there's really no dispute there! My thought is if it's a political or news-based blog, then have at it – a free-for-all should be welcomed and expected. Or, if you're commenting about a specific topic that the blog post is about. But I am astonished and amazed (and amused) when readers go beserk-o about something like a small comment made by a stranger on a personal or lifestyle blog that rubs them the wrong way, and on top of that, manifest it into a much larger, different issue that they somehow connected to be one and the same in their head. But this seems to be pretty common in the blogland, as I'm discovering. I guess that's the beauty of America and free speech, eh?
Alas, I found myself drawn into a conversation anyway over the big, bad blogosphere. After a string of upset comments by the other reader, I couldn't resist with concluding with what I thought to be the perfect bigger person response tinged with just the right touch of eat that:
"Generally speaking, I find it amusing and unfortunate all at the same time that people take blogs so seriously and make the effort to (mis)interpret tones of comments. But freedom of speech, more power to ya.
It's also unfortunate that you don't personally know the person to whom you comment – as I happen to be a designer myself and certainly appreciate individual creativity at its highest level – or that my original comment is an inside joke to my friend Maya about my extraordinary spending habits to indulge in many, many things, of which mostly include fashion and art and artwork (such as a $25 "card" with a paper-cut elephant on it that I could certainly have made myself - disclaimer: also another inside joke). Or that I promoted girlsavage on my own blog back in June. C'est la vie! xo"
It's also unfortunate that you don't personally know the person to whom you comment – as I happen to be a designer myself and certainly appreciate individual creativity at its highest level – or that my original comment is an inside joke to my friend Maya about my extraordinary spending habits to indulge in many, many things, of which mostly include fashion and art and artwork (such as a $25 "card" with a paper-cut elephant on it that I could certainly have made myself - disclaimer: also another inside joke). Or that I promoted girlsavage on my own blog back in June. C'est la vie! xo"
Oh, and before I forget... :o) :^^) :) :o) :^^) :) :o) :^^) :)
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