We’re too snarky.

This, at least, is the thesis of New Yorker film critic David Denby’s 2009 book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. Give me your angry, your clever, your feckless masses — Denby argues — yearning to post nasty things anonymously on unregulated comment boards. Then give them the Internet, and you’re going to need a helmet and a pair of shin guards.

Snark is the attempt to express in words a sensation that has no sound: The hybrid punctuation ?! -- that feeling of indignation mixed with utter disbelief. (Illustration by Nathan Wells)

Denby leaves to one side the abhorrent voices of hate groups and malevolent trolls. But even then, when he takes a big whiff of the Web, he’s frightened by what he smells. “Snark is a teasing, rug-pulling form of insult that attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness,” he writes. “It appeals to a knowing audience that shares the contempt of the snarker and therefore understands whatever references he makes.”

On the surface, it’s high-minded stuff. Denby is concerned with how the hypothetical spiteful commenter launching venom into the cybervoid relates to snark’s larger implications for our political and cultural existence.

What does it mean, Denby wonders, when a vice presidential candidate can stand before a nation and sneer that “a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities”? Denby is so alarmed by the fact that people take snarky Maureen Dowd seriously as a political commentator that he devotes an entire chapter to her. Denby wants us to share his fear that snark bodes the end of journalism itself.

It doesn’t.

David Denby is a deeply talented writer with a sharp, yet generous critical intelligence and decades of experience to his credit. But there are two reasons his book is wrong.

The first (and less important) of the two has all to do with how Denby defines snark — or rather, avoids defining it. He knows he’s against snark, but not in every case; even in his own book, he uses snark the way high-end restaurants use drizzles of sauce on mod plates — as an ornament. And he’s certainly not against irony or sarcasm in general. He ardently supports the exercise of wit. So what is this screed actually about?

For Denby, snark is born in the snarker’s sense of wounded inadequacy. The snarker, weak and defenseless, lashes out like a cornered animal. The only way to understand Denby’s logic here is to accept that, for him, the snarker exists in the same fantasy world in which bloggers are Fritos-eating schlubs in moldering pajamas, slouched in their parents’ basements, where they tap out their vitriol on laptop keyboards.

But virtually everyone acknowledges the poverty of this construction. These days, the bloggers we take seriously are almost all somewhere on the spectrum of ‘professional’, and the same goes for snarkers. Gawker and The Daily Beast — two of the most prominent purveyors of Web snark — are serious media outlets, and they’re fiercely good at what they do.

Why would Denby bother rolling around in the muck with the hacks who prowl comment boards picking fights? What he’s actually against is simply the strain of malice that often surfaces on the Internet — but you can’t sell books with a trend piece on meanness.

……

Before moving on to the second reason why snark isn’t a death knell — indeed, why snark may actually be good for us — let’s take a detour through a typical segment on The Rachel Maddow Show. Maddow is the human embodiment of the Bostonian phrase ‘wicked smart’: In this Rhodes Scholar the wicked and the smart exist in equal measure, constantly playing off each other.

Maddow’s journalism is of the fact-checked, responsible variety, and her interviews are sharp and engaging. If she wanted to play it straight, she probably could. But she almost always starts her pieces by smirking her way through a snarky gem of an introduction, as if to say, “Really? Can you believe this nonsense?” Her style is grounded in a skepticism that all too often turns out to be deserved. When Maddow uses snark, she is mapping the uncharted space in journalism between Walter Cronkite and The Daily Show.

Snark — in the form practiced by Maddow and others, its most exalted form — is the attempt to express in words a sensation that has no sound: The hybrid punctuation ?! — that feeling of indignation mixed with utter disbelief. The hypocrisy and tone-deafness of politicians — ?!. Staggering malfeasance on Wall Street ­— ?!. The success of the latest Transformers movie — ?!. Here’s the real reason we need snark: It’s the speech we turn to when the only other option is speechlessness.

For Denby, snark is anathema to substantive engagement in politics or culture. And there is; we have to admit, something impotent about snark. It’s not going to change anything by itself. But no one is saying it should. When expectant Iranians heard June’s election results, they felt ?! (or maybe even ?!?!). They didn’t snark — they flooded the streets and bellowed from rooftops, and rightly so.

But what did they do after they came down off their roofs? According to an anonymous Iranian journalist writing in The New Yorker, they sat around in their apartments telling Ahmadinejad jokes.

The crucial thing to understand is that the true snarker is actually a closet idealist. We turn to snark when a set of expectations and norms is violated — norms about how government officials should behave, about how respectfully media outlets should treat us, about what we will and will not put up with. When snark isn’t motivated by a vision of a better politics, a better engagement, it’s just spite and we can ignore it. But the good stuff, the very best snark is not only fulfilling and riotously funny, but also — dare I say it? ­— deeply, achingly hopeful.

Ben Hyman is a digital media, arts & entertainment intern for NPR.