'Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation' by David Denby

What is the worldview of a comments thread, with its anonymous posters spewing hateful rhetoric? Or of a site like Hot or Not, where people post photos of themselves and ask to be rated on their looks? "[B]y offering themselves up to be judged," Denby writes, "the participants are buying into the snark culture. . . . 'Here I am, judge me. Will I be destroyed by what you say?' "

There's a voyeuristic component here, not dissimilar to, say, the audition round of "American Idol," which draws huge ratings precisely because it allows us a forum for tearing other people down. The message in both instances is, "don't try this at home," unless you want to become a target of ridicule.

Yet what is the source of this ridicule, and of the dissatisfaction that fuels it? For Denby, it's a function of "what might be called 'superfluous anger,' which presents itself to the snarker and his fans as entirely justified nastiness. The joke -- attempted joke -- disguises the bizarre rancor from both parties."

That's an excellent observation, evoking not only the contemptuousness of our culture, but also its justification, the illusion that it's all a big in-joke. This makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy, since anyone who offers a critique clearly doesn't get it, which renders the act of criticism moot.

Denby, of course, is a prime target for such dismissal; in his 60s, the longtime film critic at the New Yorker, he's likely to be written off in certain quarters by virtue of demographics alone. Yet if he means "Snark" as a corrective, it's a corrective that comes with problems of its own. For one thing, he never fully defines his terms, using snark as a convenient catch-all for a media culture gone out of control.

To mitigate that, he tries to frame a capsule history of the subject, beginning with Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" -- Carroll's subtitle was "An Agony, in Eight Fits"; Denby constructs his book in seven "fits" -- before moving on to touchstones as diverse as the Roman satirist Juvenal, Alexander Pope and Spy magazine.

Still, even though all that suggests some sort of loose context, the book ultimately doesn't hang together, since Juvenal was less a writer of snark than of invective (related but not the same), while Carroll's poem was about a mythical beast that, despite Denby's best efforts to connect it, has nothing to do with attitude. It's a stretch from "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see," the last line of Carroll's epic, to Denby's assertion that "[t]he snark is the thing that makes you disappear" -- a reference to both the fate of Carroll's snark hunters and the effects of modern snark.