Sarcasm Online

As Andrew Sparrow was pointing out a while ago, there’s a tremendous problem with being sarcastic online, or writing parody, or anything that has a double meaning. In life we get context from tone of voice and body language, two things that are completely unavailable when reading text.

Instead, context on a blog is basically the surrounding posts. So writing something that’s supposed to be funny instead of really fucking mean is basically a matter of being consistent about it, and remembering to put in actual jokes.

The Dilbert Blog is an excellent example of this. Nothing on that blog should be taken seriously. The people who get that enjoy the blog, the people who don’t…get very angry. I wrote an awesome post about fat people this morning, but decided not to post it because it was probably going to come off as really fucking mean instead of funny.

It’s too bad, but this is the price I pay for wanting people to take my opinions seriously.