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THE_AUTUMNAL_WEB
November 14-19, 2006
December 9, 2006
A quirk of internet
history is that the
bloggers have come up Personally, I think
with a new word for we need a name for
close-reading and this tendency of blogging
point-by-point web nerds to invent podcasting anti-idiotarian
refutation: "fisking"; new -- and usually wikiwiki
based on someone's irritating -- And now,
treatment of a Fisk words for whatever redundant, "tweet"
article. they're into at the juvenile, for twits
moment. unmelifuous... in denial.
-- 5/2009
Perhaps, (Almost as
"Neologging" bad as
"unmelifuous".)
No: almost
makes sense,
doesn't sound
stupid enough.
It doesn't have
"English 2.0"? that *bang* *splat*
Closer. sound that they
One thing that's seem to like.
odd about the
term "fisking" is Maybe:
that they thought "bangsplats"
it deserved a
name at all. There are differences
with the usenet
We've been doing practice, in that
this on usenet the original author "Fisking"
for ages. is expected to be does have
hanging around, a shouting
And many an academic defending their work. at the
paper uses a television (As I think
quotation and quality a brit
commentary format.. about it. columnist
commented.)
But then, one of the Also, usenet
peculiarities of the newsreaders have
bloggers is their deep quoted-reply
conviction that it's features that
something new under aren't broken, so
the sun... they're there are many
pioneers of a new examples of
technological era! repeated exchanges
that go a dozen
They're beginners who levels deep or more.
don't know that there
have been many others It's not unheard of
before them. for web "fiskers" to
get "fisked", but But then in the
They're proud of the these exchanges aren't blog world:
"democratic" quality a regular occurrence perhaps they're
that blogging as they are on usenet. more likely to
software brings to write something
the web, but that, is closer to a
of course, a mixed finished essay?
blessing, and the
usenet world has been They seem to be
through that and come playing "op-ed"
out the other side -- columist more
often than
Look up "the eternal not... though
september" some time. without editors
telling them to
tighten it up.
Consider the case of
the "original fisk":
To my eye, this Sullivan
piece is terrible.
"Fisking" is supposed SMEAR_THE_MESSENGER
to be good for
deflating rhetoric,
but what about Sullivan's
own rhetoric?
On usenet, he
would've been
shouted down
immediately.
In fact, the original
author would probably
handle the reply...
Sullivan got in his
attack against someone
who doesn't bother
with the web.
Whatever you call it, there
are difficulties with this LIGHTNING_WAR
style of commentary:
It's deeply reductionist:
While it can indeed be useful
to highlight parts of a whole
by breaking it down into parts,
the parts are not the whole.
It's entirely possible for an
essay to have something going
for it that is not visible in
each of it's pieces.
Working over the pieces can be a
subtle form of "out of context"
quotation... dangerously subtle,
because the original words may all
be there, quoted in full:
By choosing the right points to interrupt
the original, you can throw off the flow --
and the flow may be where the real meaning
resides.
ATOMIC_THOUGHT
Another issue that's sometimes raised
is something like "Is Fisking Bullying?"
This one just seems misguided --
it's the old politeness business I find the style of argument
again -- and my take has always used on wikpedia talk pages to
been that 'tis better to be be somewhat unnerving.
allowed to be saracastic and
insulting (even if it's not Almost everyone goes through the
usually adviseable, exactly.) motions of being civil, consequently
you can't really tell what they're
thinking -- often the civility seems
to be a rote exercise, they're
reciting what they need to say for
legalistic reasons, so that if it goes
to arbitration their tone can't be
held against them.
[ref]
"Wholly undeservedly, Robert Fisk has
become something of a joke online, after
so-called 'warbloggers' back in 2001
picked on a single incident in his long
reporter career to ridicule him as an
out of touch wet, even racist
liberal. And this by people whose
closest contact with the Middle East had
been their local kebab shop. From there
we got the nasty term fisking, which
refers to any sort of unfair argument in
which an article is not criticised on
the merits of the whole, but rather is
taken apart and attacked line by line,
usually by putdown rather than logical
argument."
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