your not welcome

The problem with the democratization of communications is, of course, that most people aren't worthy of a vote. Moreover, not long ago, if bigotry-spewing morons wanted to share their thoughts with me, they had to brave doing so to my face.

No longer. The web has seen to that. Count me among the old farts who shake their fists and yell at trespassing webizens to get off their lawn.

Ignorance was bliss. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but I think far less of my fellow man than I did 10 years ago. I was happier for not having known them.

My least favorite phenomenon is rather like the schoolyard. In any web discussion, there will be a bunch of preliterate punks and a smart kid. The punks can't bang two words together, and the kid makes excellent points backed up by evidence, but the punks take a vote and agree that they're right and the smart kid is very, very stupid indeed. They mock the intellectual gulf between them and him, as if they're not on the shallow end.

Go look at any discussion that the tea party has a stake in, and tell me it's not your schoolyard revisited.

I try to avoid web comments, but I often can't, largely because outraged friends quote them to me. The only part I enjoy: seeing the punks misspell their insults of the smart kids' intelligence.

"I wonder," I thought last night, "Have we reached the point yet where most people are spelling it your stupid instead of you're stupid?"

To Google!

We're not quite there, but a life-depleting 24% of all uses of this phrase on the web are "your." I shall track this over time. When it hits 51%, I'll move to some country without broadband. It'll surely be less backward.

Stats
You're an idiot: 4.3 million
Your an idiot: 1.3 million