EPISODE 107: THE PEANUT GALLERY
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
About a week ago NPR announced that it was getting rid of its online comments at NPR.org. The reason, as you can read here, is while NPR recorded nearly 33 million users in July, most of their 491, 000 comments came from just 19,400 people – i.e. 0.0006% of their users.
Looking at comments in June and July, 4300 users posted 145 comments EACH – 67% of the site’s total contents.
I like to believe somewhere there's a species of tiny gel and
dye-abusing creatures furious about the internet.
More to the point perhaps, NPR has found that its social media sites generate much bigger and more interesting conversations.
NPR is hardly the first major organization to make this move. The Chicago Sun Times did it in 2014. So did CNN, during the protests in Ferguson; and Bloomberg Business, Wired and the Daily Beast in 2015.
Popular Science was the first big name to shut down their comments sections, though, in 2013, and their reasoning was is pretty fascinating. In a nutshell: they found that negative, troll-type comments, even if just from a minority of voices and perceived by everyone as nothing but trolling, still has the ability to skew how readers see a story. Scientific evidence becomes reduced to one of many possible opinions.
“A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’ on television....
“If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the ‘off’ switch.”
In other words, Climate Change Deniers, Shut. Up.
Is any of this a surprise? Honestly, I almost never read comments, even on the pieces I write. There’s just almost never a meaningful conversation going on. It’s the same two or three people ranting.
But believe it or not, that’s not to say good commenting can’t be found. Take for instance, Fr. Jim Martin’s public Facebook page. Jim writes books on Catholic spirituality, and having gathered quite a following, he decided to make his page a place where he would post articles, photos, spiritual reflections and other things that might inspire contemplation and/or conversation. And it really works. People sometimes share incredible stories from their own life. (He’s on retreat right now, but if you look back to his August 16th post on Jesus’ face, you’ll see what I mean.)
Probably the best story I’ve ever heard about comments sections, though, was from the Guardian in the UK.
Like most newspapers, the Guardian has a crossword. And online, don’t ask me why, but that crosswords has its own comments section.
So about a year ago someone wanders onto that page, sees this bizarre choice to have comments for a crossword, and then goes on to discover the section was basically the online version of a pub, filled with retired men talking about the weather, their sore knees, and their grandkids.
Here’s one of many articles on this hidden community. One favorite excerpt:
I need these people in my life.
What’s also amazing and wonderful about the whole thing is that despite being “discovered”, that community goes on. It’s a lot more than just retired men, too.
From yesterday:
Good morning elizabethdavid and I am sorry I did not answer you yesterday as there was uproar and we had to make a quick get away. I am sorry if that put a flea up your skirt.
But the answer is both. A lot of the evidence against Uncle Jules turned out to be inadmittable and had to be dropped so the Judge said there was no real proof and had no choice. So under the law here which is different Jules was dismissed by the Lord and was aloud to go Scott Free. But as he was being lead out he punched the air and shouted that it was one in the eye for Freedom who is my mother. We thought after that we might have to go back but it turned out all right in the end. We have now set up the soup kitchen on some waist ground in Leith which is not far from the Scottish Assembly and we shall be looking for it this afternoon.
I have my mothers' receipt for the best jerk chicken which you could put in your next book if you like and I had no problem with the crossword today.
"Flea up your skirt:" HOW IS THIS NOT A THING WE ARE ALWAYS SAYING?
Here's another:
Off to the doctor soon to have my smashed knee poked at. This is the second time I have smashed this knee. It's on my leading leg at that. Oh the mockery from my family when they discovered I believe one leg is more important to my well being and balance than the other. The first time I injured this vital knee was when I fell down the steps at Waverley Station. It was snowing. A white out. I was running for a train north. I had a notion to play at being in Doctor Zhivago as I travelled staring out at the Siberian weather. Of course, I didn't have the hat for it.
One more, this one a conversation:
muncastermonkey: Insect bites driving me nuts with itchiness so get up to look for something, anything to put on them and decide to do the crossword whilst waiting for the kettle to boil for tea. Crossword driving me nuts.
Kittycanuck: Have you tried putting a cold, wet tea bag on the bites? My friend claims it works
fyodora: I've an old mate who swears by cold, wet teabags all the time, Kitty thus: "I been chuckin' cold, wet teabags at them insects fer bloody ever", 'e sez, "but I just keep missin' the little bleeders, sod 'em!"
Cue Music (Excerpt)
She likes the free, fresh, wind in 'er 'air,
Life wivout care –
She's broke, that's oke,
Hates cold, wet teabags, they're cold an' theyre damp,
Thats why the lady's got the cramp.
That's right, that last commenter took "The Lady is a Tramp" and on the spot rewrote it about being English.
And you thought you were talented.
When people came up with comments sections, I imagine they thought it would be an online version of letters to the editor. Part of a healthy democracy and maybe a means of creating that utopian sense of community that Internet 1.0 imagined.
Clearly that dream has not borne itself out in a lot of respects...
(Sometimes the person being attacked doesn’t make things better...)
But also, maybe people are a lot like mold. (Stay with me here. Penicillin comes from a mold. You eat mushrooms. It’s going to be okay.) Out in the light we can wither up.
But leave us alone for a while under a rock, and we flourish.
Speaking of comments...I’ve been doing this newsletter for a couple months now. And you’ve been kind enough to come along for the ride. But maybe you have suggestions. I tend to like the AC on pretty high. Maybe I’ve been playing the music too loud, or you’re a little tired of all the Stephen Sondheim and Billy Joel.
But seriously (he says, after a newsletter dedicated to how horrible comments are), if you’ve got any thoughts, things you wish I were doing differently, things you want more or less of, or topics you want me to consider—don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
I’ve even created an email address for us: popculturespiritwow@gmail.com.
I can’t promise you’ll hear back from me. (Ask my friends and family how bad I am at that.) But I do promise I will read what you write. I really am interested in your thoughts and suggestions. Even if you feel like this:
(From a book of cartoons about pissed off cats called "F You, Box."
It's by Katie Cook, it's super cheap, and you should get it.)
Last thing—you know that term “peanut gallery”? According to Wikipedia—an introductory clause used way too readily not only in high school essays but everywhere else in the world today—it comes from old timey vaudeville. The cheap seats in the theater were up at the top, and up there you could buy peanuts from concessions.
Those seats were supposedly also the rowdiest. (Think bleacher seats at sports parks.) And if they didn’t like what they were seeing, those audience members had no problem pelting the entertainers with their peanuts. (A tradition we’ve really lost sight of. Who wouldn’t profit from a good occasional pelting?)
BUSH?
(In a way, this origin story is akin to the point Scientific American was making. As a vaudeville actor, if you didn’t want to get salt in your eyes, you needed to keep your attention on the drunks in the cheap seats, and if necessary adjust your performance. Which makes sense in a context of entertainment; not so much when you’re trying to convince people that no, really, we do need to stop burning coal.)
One last cool twist on peanut galleries: believe it or not, the comic strip “Peanuts” got its name from that same idea. According to the book Schulz and Peanuts, at the time United Feature Syndicate bought the rights to Schulz’s work in 1950, “The Howdy Doody Show” affectionately referred to its audience of kids as “the Peanut Gallery”. Hoping to capitalize on that, UFS renamed Schulz’s work “Peanuts”.
Schulz hated it. He thought it was “the worst title ever thought of for a comic strip.” (On the other hand, his original title had been “Li’l Folk”. Which to me sounds either like a show about elves who hide in the woods or Pete Seeger’s baby brother.)
Lucy van Pelt, Mother of Trolls
++ LINKS ++
In the vein of that story about the crossword community, check out this amazing obituary and tell me you don’t want the writer to do yours.
Hat tip to my friend Ken for this great article on “Six Things Our Terrible Movie Summer Taught Us”, including that Zack Snyder “is the Summer Movie Lesson We’ll Never Learn”. I entirely agree.
I also recommend this NYT piece about religion on television. They don’t have a lot of love for my “Preacher” –haters gonna hate – but it is a really interesting conversation.
(My takeaways: sitcoms are able to do religion way better than dramas, because they’re much more able to be about just normal everyday life; “The Leftovers” is the show about faith we should all be watching (because it’s fantastic); and people still remember the far-too-short-lived show about a parish created by Fr. Bill Cain, SJ, “Nothing Sacred.”)
Lastly, on the topic of faith and pop culture, did you know that there’s a hilarious Mormon sketch-comedy TV show? It’s called “Studio C”; one of the editors at America asked me to look into it because he and his kids love watching it on YouTube. And believe it or not, some of it really is at least SNL-level funny. (I highly recommend Inner City Spelling Bee , Jason Bourne Resurfaces 2016 and Top Soccer Shootout Ever with Scott Sterling -- give it a minute.)
Have a great week. Take a week off from reading about politics. Think of it as a spa day for your soul.
