It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!

I’m feeling better. And one of the serendipitous side-effects of being bed-bound and in possession of a laptop and wifi is the possibility of stumbling across breaking internet phenomena at source, rather than finding out about them only to be told by, say, your Mum that she is already on Twitter / has an avatar / has been Rickrolled etc. Of course, the downside is that a genuinely fresh trend will in all likelihood fail to blossom to glorious ubiquity, but that’s the risk the avid internet pioneer faces.

David Mitchell, a British comedian and writer of wholly unparalleled genius (I wish he was my friend, but he has inexplicably yet to get in contact), has built a substantial broadcasting career on an uncanny ability to explicate the irritations and frustrations of being alive. He isn’t the first and won’t be the last to entertain in this fashion, but, at the moment, he’s certainly the best.

In a recent column for the Observer, Mitchell discusses the nature of posted comments on the ‘net, a favourite grindstone with which Mitchell fans will be intimately acquainted. Therefore, the gist is fairly obvious: Web 2.0’s capacity to give voice to the opinions of all and sundry, whilst being ‘democratising’, simultaneously offers a far-too-public platform for the deranged, frustrated and enthusiastically impolite. A wonderful, lovingly compiled collection of these kinds of comments (the majority of which, tragically enough, come from my erudite countrymen and women in the UK) can be found at ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com. This brilliant, brilliant blog collects its material exclusively from the BBC’s Have Your Say user comments section, and browsing for longer than a couple of minutes leaves one in that curious position of crying with both laughter and despair at the nature of humankind. Try doing THAT with a tummy bug.

Anyway, aware as I am that this very entry is beginning to take on the unstructured nature of many of the comments I am so roundly criticising, I’ll come to the point. Refusing to give in to the moronic onslaught, yet aware that posting intelligent, considered comments as a counter-balance is inefficient as it by its nature involves a degree of time and thought, Mitchell suggests a different strategy: we should stem the tide of idiocy by posting the most gentle, innocuous and universally applicable phrase wherever the opportunity presents itself (the comments section below is naturally a good place to start). And the phrase he advocates: ‘It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!’.

Several hundred people have posted this sentence at the bottom of the Mitchell’s column, and I was initially alerted to its significance when it kept cropping up on YouTube clips featuring the chap himself. However, this is still all very, very new: the article was only published a couple of days ago, hence my excitement that my debilitated condition had led to find something that is yet to ‘break’. But will it? A swift google of “It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!” suggests that so far only Metafilter has spotted the trend. But lots of people read that, and at least five people read this, so who knows? Maybe this is the start of something big …

Oh, by the way, one last thing (if you write properly, stop reading now). Please, please forgive my unforgivably teacherly tone here – but it is very important to get the sentence right … there’s an apostrophe in the word ‘can’t’ and the letter ‘o’ is required twice in ‘too’. I know that the majority equate a preference for elegant punctuation and correct spelling with a crime against humanity, but in this case it’s pretty important in order to avoid undermining the whole enterprise. You can’t be too careful …