“Arbitrary Comments”

In the side­bar on the front page of this site there’s now something called “Arbi­trary Com­ments,” or what might be called a “Shout­box” if I didn’t think “Shout­box” soun­ded so stu­pid. This is for com­ments that have no home, that aren’t in res­ponse to any par­ti­cu­lar post. It’s a nice thing to have, but mostly I just wan­ted to see if I could do it using the stan­dard Word­Press fra­me­work without having to ins­tall a shit­tily writ­ten plu­gin that would crap out with the next upgrade.

All I did was create a “Page” (a tech­ni­cal Word­Press term) called Arbi­trary Com­ments, then, in the side­bar, call that page and load its com­ments with these sim­ple lines:

<?php query_posts('page_id=120'); ?>
<?php the_post(); ?>
<?php comments_template(); ?>

I also imple­men­ted a PHP trick from Libertà to sort the retrie­ved com­ments in des­cen­ding order of crea­tion, as all good shout­bo­xes do.

Shout­bo­xes are an inte­res­ting new medium. And they really are new, I mean, nothing like them has ever really exis­ted in the past. A com­ment in a shout­box is a mes­sage that is osten­sibly addres­sed to the owner of the shout­box, but is inten­tio­nally public. The clo­sest thing to this that I can think of are those dry erase boards peo­ple put on their doors in college, with a pen han­ging from them so that any­body wal­king by could write something. Bys­tan­ders aren’t exactly part of the audience of the mes­sage, but there’s clearly something more com­pe­lling to this than email or pri­vate messaging.

It’s cer­tainly one of the big­gest draws of MyS­pace. Their com­men­ting sys­tem makes every pro­file orga­nic, alive, inte­rac­tive. Peo­ple attract com­ments more often than they update their pro­file them­sel­ves, and that’s one of the main rea­sons to check people’s pro­fi­les, which is about all you really do on MyS­pace. And there’s something more friend-like in ope­ning up your per­so­nal page to the impul­ses of those peo­ple you’ve told MyS­pace are your “friends,” exten­ding trust in the mutual crea­tion of a page that is inten­ded to define you.

I remem­ber trying out Vox a cou­ple months ago, which seems to mar­ket itself as something like MyS­pace with a hea­vier focus on blog­ging. I thought it would be per­fect, but I soon rea­li­zed that, at this point, unless your social net­wor­king site allows arbi­trary com­ments, you’re not using a social net­wor­king site — you’re using a blog­ging site with tenuous little con­nec­tions bet­ween mem­bers. And nobody cares about your fuc­king blog.