Clicking a “View All Comments” button is a mild manifestation, I suspect, of the Freudian death instinct. Illustration by Ellen Surrey

If the Internet were to receive its own Ten Commandments—picture a Moses figure descending from Mountain View, clutching a stone phablet etched with a listicle of moral directives—somewhere in there would surely be the phrase “Thou Shalt Not Read the Comments.” There are few online experiences more dispiriting, more arduously futile, than the downward scroll into the netherworld of half-assed provocations and inanities that exists beneath the typical opinion piece or YouTube video. It is plainly bad for the soul, the whole business, and yet we do it, all the time—or I do, at any rate, more of the time than I care to reflect upon. Fairly frequently, someone will post a link to something on Facebook or Twitter with the stern caveat that, although comments should obviously be avoided as a rule, the comments on this specific article must be avoided with especial care, and I will find myself clicking the link and having a quick read of the piece before doing, at considerable length and with considerable rigor, precisely what I have been warned against, precisely because I have been warned against it. There’s presumably some kind of masochistic imperative at work here—the perverse compulsion of masochism, that is, without any of the perverse pleasure. (Clicking a “View All Comments” button is a mild manifestation, I suspect, of the Freudian death instinct.)

And yet there is something narrow, and basically anachronistic, about this view of “the comments” as a phenomenon restricted to the unconsecrated ground below the line. Because it is possible to think of the Internet itself, in all its incomprehensible vastness, as an exponentially ramifying network of commentary and metacommentary. It’s comments all the way down. Social media, at any rate, and Twitter in particular, are a continually metastasizing accretion of marginalia. A tweet is a comment implicitly calibrated to provoke further comment, by way of replies or retweets or favorites: it is a form of text produced in order not just to be read but to generate the production of further text. (Almost every time I compose a tweet and click send, I become discomfitingly aware that I just made the Internet slightly longer than it already was, which was way too long in the first place.)

The mind blanks at this sheer volume of commentary generated with every elapsing second, this unreckonable tonnage of weigh-ins. One of my favorite things on the Internet is a site called Listen to Wikipedia, which produces a soothing aleatory succession of chimes and sonorous strings, each of which stands for a Wikipedia edit being made in real-time. Listening to these sounds while viewing the graphical display of the writings they denote is a strange experience, irreconcilably calming and vertiginous. (I just now checked in on the site and, at time of writing, a disparate coterie of civic-spirited randos is editing entries on the Eurovision Song Contest, and pulmonary tuberculosis, and the Philippine women’s national volleyball team, and the actor Matt Dillon, and the qualifying rounds of the Men’s Singles at the 2005 French Open, and the McDonalds Filet-O-Fish, and the date January 6th, and the defunct British soap opera “Crossroads,” and the Junior Murvin song “Police and Thieves,” and the cider brand Strongbow, and the North Dakotan town of Burnstad, and Lithuania’s national airline, and Lieutenant Colonel Arthur John Bigge.)

It is this wider sense of “the comments”—the bewildering datascape of Amazon reviews, Facebook likes, Yelp! ratings, and YouTube blurtings—that the academic Joseph M. Reagle, Jr., explores in his new book “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web.” The mildly contrarian idea underpinning the book is that the comments should, in fact, be read—at least in the academic sense of “reading” as analysis and contextualization. (Part of the original point of cultural studies as a discipline, after all, was the application of scholarly tools to subjects not traditionally considered worthy of scholarly consideration: an intellectual dispensation whereby damn near anything got to be considered a “text.”) This kind of book seems an especially virtuous endeavor given that so many of us are now continually engaged in our own fitful projects of online content creation. “Although I do not advocate that everyone read all the comments all the time,” as Reagle puts it with welcome clemency, “I think that it is wise to understand them.”

One of the book’s insights is that content “calls forth even more content,” and it would be hard to disagree with this, no matter how you understood the term “content.” (See, for example, the immediate evidence of the content you are currently reading, called forth by the content of Reagle’s book—or, if we’re going to be strictly accurate, by the content of an editor’s e-mail asking that I read the book and write about it.) And although this is a phenomenon that has been exponentially accelerated by the advent of the Internet, it isn’t by any means a new one. At the height of the Enlightenment, Gottfried Leibniz recoiled at the “horrible mass of books that keeps on growing,” concerned that there might be no end “to books continuing to increase in number.” Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Reagle points out, was in a sense a reaction to the reading public’s desire to get some kind of purchase on this proliferation of text—for what we would now call “curation” or “aggregation.” The book’s discussion of this historical context is too brief to be anything but an enjoyable diversion, but it does throw up some instructive tidbits. “In Dennis de Coetlogon’s A Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745),” we learn, “the ‘Geography’ article begins with the nation of France because it is ‘the first in rank’ and ‘the most fertile, the most agreeable, and the most powerful in Europe.’ ” Reagle sensibly avoids any glib historical analogy, but it’s difficult not to indulge oneself in thinking of this as a kind of Enlightenment clickbait, an early prototype of the sort of spurious Best-Fifty-This-or-That article that always seems written specifically to arouse the petty irritation, and voluminous commentary, of a particular kind of reader. (The skillfully trolled constituencies, in this case, would presumably be German or British.)

Reagle’s initial engagement with his subject arises out of his own admitted status as what he calls a “maximizer,” a person who “must be assured that every decision is optimal.” Maximizers, he writes, “spend hours reading reviews and feel disappointed when an item falls short of expectations or is surpassed by a new model. They suffer from the fear that they could have made a better decision; this is the paradox of increased information and choice.” Reagle is something of a maximizer, too, in his approach to his subject, in the sense that he has a tendency to offer us a lengthy succession of illustrations of the specific kind of commentary he is discussing. He gives us a great many examples of product reviews, from the useful to the absurd. And there’s a section on unboxing videos—the weird, and weirdly popular, phenomenon in which people record themselves carefully and lovingly removing products from their packaging—in which he provides ample descriptions of individual videos, but never enters into the cultic strangeness of the ritual, with its sterile erotics of consummation between product and purchaser.