I enjoyed the video at the bottom of this page, although it’s a little long for most internet attention spans.  In it filmmaker Kevin Smith, of Clerks, Dogma and Chasing Amy fame, to name but a few, talks about how obsessively he used to read all his internet reviews, right down to the comments.  This is quite rare, or at least it was until recently, because most people still tended to treat internet criticism as a distant and very poor relation to its more salubrious and established cousins.

The problem with taking it seriously is of course, well, where do you stop?  It’s like being able to overhear every last pub conversation about your work that has ever taken place.  Not one single human being talks complete, considered sense all of the time and before you even get into whether or not you want to bother agreeing with someone or not just imagine how many times you yourself just don’t quite express yourself properly.  Instead of disappearing into the air, being re-stated slightly better, or just mitigated with a shrug of the shoulders this stuff now sits there in black and white for all eternity, staring you down on the screen.

The Soft Pack – Right and Wrong (How I wish these guys were still called The Muslims.)

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Then there’s whether or not you really want to bother.  As he sort of mentions, would you ever want to hear every last conversation about you which was had by anyone who’d ever met you, no matter how brief?  Christ, the number of people out there saying that I, for example, am a bit of a dick would be enormous.  Face it, most people don’t like you that much.  Think how many people you like, then subtract it from the five or six billion people in the world.  Think about how many bands, or films, you like and then subtract that from the total number of bands or films which have ever existed.

For some reason, because things are in black and white, including both the comments and the posts on this site, people seem to vest them with more importance than they merit, whereas they are the musical equivalent of a pub conversation.  The table might be a little bigger for those sites with a large audience, but how many of us would your average band or fan even bother to disagree with if they overhead us publically not liking their band in a bar somewhere?  Probably very few.  I know the internet has made these conversations much more public than they used to be, but they are still just ordinary conversations.

Kevin Smith: