Comment Sections

fear not, this is not a departure of BDCDCDBDC's new found function as a music blog. we just have some other thoughts to share.

this track is off Ghostland Observatory's new album coming out March 4. why do i know that? because i'm actually really excited about this album. the last album i marked on the calendar was Radiohead’s In Rainbows. the one before that was Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and before that, TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain. i say this because Ghostland has suddenly found themselves in some pretty illustrious company—in my mind at least.

the point of this post is comments, though. while riding the interwebs 3.0 infobahn we absorb a very different experience than we did in the day’s of napster and yahoo’s dominance. We no longer simply consume the internet, nor do we simply subscribe to it. In this the-future-is-now era, we create the internet. this post is itself an example of that. But everyone has a role to play in the future, not just bloggers, thus the comments section.

comments sections are often the best part of a blog post or news article. google recognized this early with blogger and recently even The Economist caught on to the magic (sorry, no link, but it is announced on page 17 of the print edition, jan 25-feb 1). comments allow people to speak their minds and often times their minds are hilarious and honest. the comments section of a DCist post from last year on crime in Columbia Heights had one of the best documented discussions of gentrification I have ever seen. over 220 people voiced their frustrated, frightened and concerned minds by the time it was all said and done. comments ranged from defensive to accusatory to passive. I don’t think anyone would argue that this comment section was much, much better than the actual article to which everyone was responding.

but not all comments sections need to be serious. another one of the best comments sections I’ve ever seen was in response to a WK12 project. WK12 is an advertising school within wieden+kennedy’s portland studio. in 2006 these students were approached by GOOD Magazine to create a spread on “I *heart* America.” the project was interesting and I enjoyed the video they made documenting it. but it was the adweek blog post sharing the video really got it going. the commenters on this post had nothing but hate for these kids. some gems include, “It was like the cast of 'The Real World--Williamsburg, Brooklyn'" and “Good for that girl who got fed up with advertising. Way to put your foot down, walk away from it all, and enroll in advertising school. At an advertising agency. That makes ads.” people expressed their cynicism with advertising, their frustration with their careers and the industry and (dare I say it?!) their jealousy of w+k.

now, you can argue that the purpose of these stories is to get these dialogues going and I wouldn’t disagree. news and advertising are both forms of communication and communication really shouldn’t be a one way street. and that's why comments sections are the bombdotcom.com. comments sections make the dialogue we’ve come to love possible.