As we move through this saga on morality and modality and modesty and mediocrity and mood and monstrousness...  I think I ran out of m's, we will move on to n's later. At any rate, our third canon in the netwebblogosphere deals with the UNSEEN. Kind of like Twilight Zone, but more ominous and outrageful and odd and orange. All right, maybe not orange. I have to find more o's. And I skipped n's because I was not in the mood.        

And so, without further fanfare I present (drum roll) our:

THIRD CANON OF ETHICS IN THE NETWEBBLOGOSPHERE:


  3. Be careful about your tone. As in email and other cyber communication, blog commenting is susceptible to misinterpretation because readers cannot hear the tone of your voice or see your facial expressions. Sarcasm, teasing, even an innocent joke can so easily be taken the wrong way in a public forum like this. Emoticons are helpful to clarify how you want your comment to be taken.
 
                       
Let us imagine a blog that begins:

Take my wife, please, I mean take her, take her far away.

And you comment:

I thought we already buried her in the previous chapter of this idiotic blog.

How am I to take this?  I mean bringing back that terrible nightmare to simply hurt my incredibly sensitive feelings?

And review the original post. What if the poster's wife saw this? What about her feelings. Unless she really was having an affair with the pool boy or even the pool girl and was writing checks off his accounts and writing bad things about him to the FBI. Well then you could not condemn him for actually killing her...but I digress as Belle likes to say.

Now let us review a more concrete example of commenting. I present Q:

"Thoughtful, knowledgeable commenters gain a following." Yeah, but so do morons. Don't believe me? Go to Craig's place. Now, I'm not saying he's a moron. I'm just coming real close. Super-Lube Gillette Mach 7 Now With 5 Blades & A Rotating Laser Head close. That's close.

"Condescending smartypants are about as welcome on a blog as they are in someone's living room." Well, I'm someone, and Craig Crawford is not welcome in my living room. Nor in the drawing room, the pizza room, the billiards room, the quite old socks room, the bedroom, the pizza box room or the bathroom. I hate one-room apartments.

I would give you a fuller context for this comment, but with Q, context is irreverent and irrelevant at the same time. First, someone could take the Super-Lube Gillette Mach 7 out of context and think that it was some sexual toy even with the 5 blades and everything. But in previous comments he already clarified the 75 sex toys he regularly uses. But if you were new to this site you would not understand the double entendre. I just like to say entendre once in awhile. It makes my....well, I digress as Belle puts it.

And someone might not know that Q really lives in a ten million dollar mansion with a beautiful woman and a lot of pool boys and that he has an acre in the back that is constantly being dug up and filled in and....

The point here is that someone might think that Q is poor and lives in a pizza room and then they look him up in face book and send him money which he uses for booze and drugs and hookers.

Or take this example from one of Obey's comments:

An asset bubble has popped, which means we suddenly discover that as a society we are much poorer than we thought. But we 'lost' nothing but an illusion. There's a decent argument out there that the last 18 years of supposed productivity growth was one big illusion. Now that the illusion has vanished, there is the further question of who is to take on the losses. It should be the financial sector stakeholders. But it probably won't be. That's another problem.

Now everybody knows that stakeholders are important in Dracula movies. I never understood the garlic, because I never saw a vampire hurt by garlic. And crosses, hell (blesses himself), the vampire just covers up its eyes and then throws you across the room But Stakeholders, they killed the vampire.  

If regular stakeholders are that dangerous to vampires, just think how dangerous they could be to financial sectors. Now if only I could HEAR the TONE of Obey as he makes this fine point I might have a better hold, grasp if you will of the stake as well as his true message.

One other thing, if the last 18 years was an illusion, does that mean I could go back when I was young and had money?  Again I AM MISSING THE TONE of the message.

One more from Jade, who likes to try to hide her real feelings about things, as it were:

If only it was Zeus really coming down from his commune on the mountaintop laden with freshly baked wisdom and bread, instead of some toothless, middle-aged bum with his pants around his ankles, scratching his crab-infested crotch, shouting made up bible verses while standing on an old wooden milk crate begging people to look at him, talk to him, pay attention to him, puh-leeeze read the crayon scrawl he made on a stray piece of cardboard that used to be the roof of his corrogated box condo, it's so damn vital to your very existence, horning in on conversation that doesn't have a damn thing to do with him as you stroll by, never realizing for a moment that nobody gives a shit about Him-Who-Knoweth-Nothing...

I pled with Jade, please do not air your true feelings about me. After all I have suspenders now
and I bath regularly with the soap furnished in the ER. And I read the bible to myself these days. I have also passed middle age, unless I live to the ideal age listed on the Egyptian cuniforms comes into play someday.  But, she insisted upon becoming a Jadas, just like in the bible I have been reading.

YOU SEE, IT IS ALL TONE. And that is why those ring tones cost so much on the telphones.


The tone on my phone is another thing, but I digress.

Please keep your comments to under 70,000 characters. I have trouble with the temporary memory on my scroll.