Immortality is Mine

John Scalzi codifies Rawdon's Law of Blog Retreat. If this doesn't get me into the Jargon File, then nothing will.

There is surely a corollary to this law regarding people who crow in their blogs about something written about them in someone else's blog (you know, like I'm doing right now). But self-congratulatory prose rarely engenders as much discussion as heated arguments or whinging about such, so maybe it's not worth codifying. If you can't pat yourself on the back in your own journal, then what's a journal for, anyway?

Oh! The self-referential irony!

I've been on the Internet since 1989 (wow, 15 years!), and when they say "it takes all kinds", you can be pretty sure they're all on-line somewhere. Or, as one of my favorite bon mots puts it:

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."

At some point you realize that not only are there a lot of dunderheads out there, there are also a lot of perfectly reasonable people who have days and get snippy, with or without reason. Then consider that it's easy to spew bile on-line because it only takes a few minutes to type a rant, during which you're not being confronted with the immediate negative feedback to your words that in-person debate makes possible. Taking offense and getting all pissy because you're upset about it is rarely worth it. (As John also notes, getting pissy for other reasons can sometimes be useful.)

Some people seem to recognize this naturally. I envy them; often, these people end up becoming role models of mine if I get to know them better. I tend to feel my emotions pretty keenly and it's often quite a struggle to keep from ranting in kind (and it's a struggle I don't always win). Maybe every feels this way and some people just win the struggle to keep their poise more often than others. All I know is my own experience.

Despite being about a decade into the mass-marketing of the Internet, I think behaviors and attitudes on-line are generally not well-understood, and certainly not widely understood. The best-known behaviors tend to get codified as things like Godwin's Law. It's better than no mechanism at all for promulgating such knowledge, but it's a crude one.