The idea for Snark Week came up in one of those email chains the writers of streets.mn pass back and forth during the work day with story ideas and assignments. “Snark” probably isn’t the exact right word, but for our purposes here, it does rhyme with “shark.”
So don’t worry about a narrow diet of straight-up snarking for a week – after all, no reasonable person wants a fake Upper Midwest-specific transit and land use version of The Onion, right? Instead, the writers of streets.mn will be spending Snark Week broadly playing around with the popular conventions of online writing, journalism and social media. Each day this week is generally divided into five sections, each familiar to daily consumers of social media:
- Monday, Dec 1 – Meme Day
- Tuesday, Dec 2 – Clickbait Day
- Wednesday, Dec 3 – Listicle Day
- Thursday, Dec 4 – Infographics Day
- Friday, Dec 5 – Sarcasm Day
I am not sure what Friday’s theme involve precisely, but I am sure whatever it is will be super-awesome and the kind of thing you’ll definitely want to check out like as much as possible.
So is Snark Week’s existence a grand, all-encompassing commentary on the state of online culture and it discontents? An exploration into how language and images shape our understanding of issues?
Oh god, no. We just think it’ll be funny. And, of course, we want clicks.
That said, the language of the internet pervades our everyday lives, and informs everything we see. The way we talk about issues and culture is inevitably viewed, at least partially, through the language of social media. It’s only natural to want to mess with the forms a little bit and see what happens. Streets.mn is a pure product of the internet, and to paraphrase Huffington Post Arts & Culture section blogger William Carlos Williams, the pure products of the internet go crazy. So let’s go crazy.