Almost everything is true.

And yet, the most interesting writing on Snarkmarket (and elsewhere) comes in response to a pressing event. Ambinder’s departure from blogging, or the Prop 8 verdict — these provide the occasion for considered discussion, that somehow still avoids the “someone is wrong” response.

I’m thinking of the key principle of Wikipedia, “assume good faith”. A principle that’s often strained to the point of breaking on that sprawling collaborative endeavour, but one with remains a good basis for having a useful conversation.

I’d just written this post about potatoes, paper, and petroleum, and I think the line was, “what are you going to do? Call me a shill for the potato industry?” It’s just so tangential to what everyone else is saying.

There’s also a difference in style and tone. Half the time on Wired, if I get a streak of snarky comments, it’s because the readers haven’t actually read what I’ve written. They’ve just read the headline or skimmed the article. And in many ways, the articles are written to be skimmed. You don’t repeat information or spend time qualifying what you’re saying, so if a reader misses it, they just fill in the gaps with whatever they want to believe.

The best comment thread I ever had on Wired was for my How to do (almost) everything with a Kindle 3 post. The tone I wrote was different, the style of post was different, the way I engaged with commenters was different.

It was amazing; and I couldn’t do it every day. It was impossible.

The other thing I’ll point to is that a site’s commenters vary tremendously based on how they enter any given post. At Wired, most readers come in through the front page. They don’t care who you are, they have no conception of your history, a lot of the tricks you use to build up narratives and establish a persona and a set of credibility over time just don’t work. Nearly every encounter is a cold encounter.

Gizmodo, on the other hand, where my posts are sometimes syndicated, has its share of drop-ins, but I suspect most of its commenters come in through RSS. You get the perception very quickly that the author doesn’t matter in a different way; they’re writing for each other, jabbing, snarking, making jokes, adding bits of information, knocking arguments back and forth.

Both of them are weirdly ego-deflating. But again, I don’t think you can single out blogs by content and say “tech blogs are like this,” “political blogs are like this.” The stew of microcultures is really wide-ranging.

What people usually forget is that he’s not talking about Union Square or Speakers’ Corner or any place Out In Public. Historically, he traces the emergence of the public sphere to coffee shops; in particular, a kind of 18th/19th century MittelEuropean version of them, where middle-class men would meet and share newspapers (newspapers were expensive!) and talk about what was happening in the world.

By modern democratic standards, that space looks pretty elitist and nonrepresentative, but pre-1850, it was pretty radically democratic. And I think that kind of coherent discussion does need more common ground and cleared-away space than the kind of drive by, honk your horn, and shout out what you feel stuff that happens in most blogs.

* Do you know how people say “there’s an app for that”? Well, for most things, I can say “there’s a German philosopher for that.”

It’s not just limited to The Snarkmarket. The happiest course I took in college was a humanities seminar co-taught by two big-name professors who also happened to be good friends. They took turns lecturing. They teased each other. They critiqued each other’s opinions. And by doing so, they very consciously set a tone in which the freshmen and sophomores in the class could let go of their OH MY GOD MUST IMPRESS PROFESSOR WITH MY BRILLIANT COMMENT attitude and just talk about books. By the end, the 30-student felt like a family–at least by research university standards.

I spent a lot of time yesterday on Alexis’ Zadie Smith/Facebook thread, and it really struck me how many of the comments were phrased in this strangely defensive/aggressive tone, even within the confines of what was by Internet standards a very thoughtful, civilized discussion. Even son, many of the commenters’ verbal body language was: elbows in tight, fists at the ready. They were needlessly dismissive or arrogant. Often their actual points were perfectly interesting, and shouldn’t have triggered defensiveness, but they were strangers talking to other strangers, and that made many of them a little shrill. I think my tone would have been like that, too (there I was, at The Atlantic, tracking my dirty footprints across their 153-year-old carpet!) except that I know Alexis. I didn’t have to do the virtual version of grabbing him by the elbow and blurting out a garbled response because I assumed I was going to bore him and wasn’t he ready to move on, already. I didn’t feel like I had to prove myself in some way (through forcefulness, or frustration) to earn myself the right to talk. I had been to this dinner party before, and I knew some of the other people who were probably going to show up, and I could relax.

I wrote my senior thesis on university classroom discussion, and it was very obvious that discussion groups always had some of their best conversations just as the semester was drawing to a close. It took them that long to a) relax and b) warm up to each other. It’s not rocket science. It just takes goodwill and time–and, I think, a little bit of knowing people in real life, or at least across different contexts. For instance, Saheli, I do not think that it’s completely a coincidence that it’s taken us ten months to exchange.(which is clearly about something that both of us think about a lot.) Good things take time.