I get where he’s coming from, but I live in a very different space. First of all, this right here is the closest I come to spouting off on social media. I bailed on Facebook years ago, never bothered with Twitter, and am chronically shy about starting conversations, even online, rather than joining existing ones. Also, and probably more importantly, I am not a professional writer. Someday maybe, but certainly not yet. So there isn’t a sense that I’d be slagging my colleagues if I publicly badmouth their crappiest work. There’s also the fact that here at BBS, I’m just another voice in the forum, without a particular audience that’s paying particular attention to me over any other given commenter. So there isn’t much damage I could do at any rate.
Still, I have no qualms about telling people what I think about Dan Brown’s writing, if asked. Or the failures of Scott Smith’s The Ruins. Sure, those guys made a mint off their bestsellers, and lots of people liked them. Big deal. Who am I to criticize? Well, I’m a reader. I subscribe to the idea I first heard from Harlan Ellison that everyone is entitled to their own informed opinion, and so if I’ve read a particular book or seen a particular movie and I’ve satisfied myself that I have a reasonably well-informed opinion of its merits and shortcomings, I don’t mind voicing those. I agree that filling up the world with my negative opinions doesn’t feel as constructive as offering my recommendations of what I actually liked and why. And yet, if I’ve read something that provoked a negative reaction in me that was stronger than merely boredom or garden-variety “not working for me” distaste, that reaction might be of interest to someone, particularly if they asked. If someone asked me what I thought about Paul Haggis’ Crash winning the Best Picture Oscar, I’d fill their ears with everything I found wrong with that mindless waste of celluloid (and for once I’d go toe-to-toe with Ebert over this one). I can’t hurt Paul Haggis, nor his career (and I wouldn’t want to), but though I outwardly show respect for the opinions of those who preferred that movie over Brokeback Mountain, I privately wonder what in the hell is wrong with those people. It’s similar to my tolerance for the religiously devout. I can carry on perfectly polite and amicable conversations (even disagreements) with theists, but somewhere in the back of my mind lingers a persistent suspicion that their intellectual development is somewhat incomplete. I square this with the idea that they probably believe I’m damned to perdition, but they’ll still share a sixpack of Dr Pepper with me, and the world goes 'round and 'round.
It strikes me as a trifle disingenuous to mention in a Facebook post that something you read struck you as lame, or ill-conceived, or poorly-executed, or simply flat-out wrong, and when someone asks you what it was you read, you coyly refuse to answer on the grounds that you don’t want to incriminate the author with your negative opinion. Then why in the world did you speak up in the first place? Facebook isn’t really a private journal for one to muse out loud; there’s an audience (however small; my own Friends list never reached three figures) and it’s kinda dumb to pretend they’re not there. And it strikes me as a teeny bit rude to bring up a thought or opinion that you aren’t prepared to clarify with a corroborating fact or extenuating circumstance or two. If you post, “Boy, I read the most nauseating sonnet this morning, completely put me off my oatmeal, so now I’m starving,” and somebody’s interested enough to ask, “What sonnet was that?” now you’ve painted yourself into a corner. If you don’t want to rat out the fact that your Great Aunt Esmeralda can’t string two iambs together with both hands and a staple gun, you then say, “Oh, I’d rather not say; the point was I missed my breakfast,” and you sound like a bit of a bait-and-switch twit for selling your headline with a juicy kernel of dirt and paying it off with a high-minded platitude that makes your readers sorry they cared for a second about what you were saying.
There’s an ancient wisdom behind mom’s old proverb “if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.” Don’t just fill the air with your opinion about some unnamed hack’s failures in order to get it out of your system, and then feel everything’s fine if you just don’t name the hack. Now you’ve just alerted the multitudes about the existence of some work of (arguable) art that fails in ways you found interesting enough to expound upon, but you won’t condescend to name to said multitudes so that they may see if they share your opinion, or perhaps might like to challenge it. In my opinion, that’s about as insulting to your audience as your negative criticism might be to the artist in question.
