Rochelle Hartman’s latest post, “Politeness? Overrated.” struck a chord with me in an odd way. I left a smartass comment on the post itself, but it’s really a juicy post, and deserves more than a one-liner.

She starts by saying that we needn’t be so polite with vendors and other business partners:

But when preparing to hand over loads of taxpayer money to vendors, jobbers and consultants, politeness should be one of the the last considerations in your interactions.

So if the OPAC, among other things, sucks, it sucks. Let’s be up front about it. Right on.

But Hartman takes it further to question an overly polite library 2.0 demimonde (as I believe Tim Spalding once called it/us):

There are a lot of cheerleaders among us. It’s awesome that we acknowledge and celebrate each other’s work and successes. I really do value being part of such a caring, communicative community, but some days, it feels like more of a beige suburb where everything looks good, even though you know there’s more going on than meets the eye.

(Cue Blue Velvet clip of picket fence, lawn, insects.)

I thought this was very interesting because as I read it, I rehearsed in my head some of my recent thoughts about politeness, blog “drama” and the like.

When I’m feeling particularly argumentative, I usually indulge those feelings not here at See Also…, but in the comments of other people’s blogs. I have come to believe that this is (a) cowardly and (b) pointless.

Cowardly because, even though I sign all my comments, I know that they aren’t as easily linked to me as this blog is.

Pointless because I don’t know that I have ever convinced anyone of anything in those kinds of comments, and because simply objecting to someone else’s ideas doesn’t usually move the conversation forward.

I have been reading Joseph Harris’s book Rewriting on effective academic writing. In his chapter on “Countering,” he writes about using sources in your writing that you disagree with:

What do I hope will result from pursuing this disagreement? If the answer is simply that I think I can prove that the text I am reading has certain shortcomings or limits, then I try to set aside the temptation to argue…. But if I can use certain problems in a text as a springboard to get at something I couldn’t otherwise say, to develop a line of thinking of my own, then I try to note those problems in a way that allows me to quickly move on to my own counterproposals or ideas.

So, for me, I think that if I’m really rubbed the wrong way by a post somewhere, I’ll resist the urge to comment. If I believe my disagreement is really interesting and important, and I believe I can provide an alternative viewpoint, I’ll write it up for this blog and leave a trackback on the post that sparked it.

I suppose it is a bit silly to say “me too!” to a post that calls for more argument and less echo-chamber in liblogs, but it looks like that’s what I’m doing. My new year’s resolution: less flaming snark in the comments, more substantive disagreement here.