Andrew Sulllivan’s weekly tri-partite column (I will be responding to the second part) is out and it rings all sorts of nostalgia bells for me:
Is social media on the decline? Here’s hoping. A lovely piece in The New Yorker last week by Jia Tolentino lamented the loss of blogging, idiosyncrasy, quirkiness, and intelligence from the web. This set of reflections on the Awl compiled by Max Read in these pages also conveys the essence of the Internet That Nearly Was. Tom Scocca gets the essence of this old era: “What the Awl represented to me was the chance to write exactly what I meant to write, for an audience I trusted to read it.”
I feel entirely the same way about the blogging golden age. What was precious about it was its simple integrity: A writer gets to explore her craft and develop her own audience.
His Golden Age remarks are reminiscent of the BBSing era for myself and so many others. And it didn’t require that we be writers, but just people who wanted to express some thought or another, against the possibility that someone else might criticize it. No editors, just the backlash of those critiques.
Those were golden times for many of us, particularly those who were socially awkward. Imagine – the chance to actually (virtually) talk without being interrupted by someone with a louder voice or poorer upbringing! Of course, if you couldn’t take criticisms then it still wasn’t all that great – but the smart ones grew callouses, participated, matured (or not), and made lifelong friends. In fact, I just received a Holidays letter from a friend from those times, which includes her particular fetish – collecting quotes from friends for later regurgitation. Some are in her database, scraped from the BBSes, some are “still on napkins.” (And, yes, I had the honor of being part of the source of one of the quotes in the letters.)
Andrew then addresses social media:
The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery. Facebook is long overdue for a collapse, and the old institutions are showing signs of developing more character and coherence. Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair cannot wait for FaceTwitterGramChat to peak:
A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.
The evidence that social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life is beginning to become unavoidable. And the possibility that the media may recover from its loss of nerve is real.
Readers will reward quality. The editors of our day, if we’re lucky, will begin to realize that this is the economic future of journalism, and bank on it again. This tide will turn. Drop your Twitter; abandon Facebook; and buy a subscription to a magazine that is trying to save its own soul.
I regard Facebook as fine marketing platform, a marginal keep in touch platform, a horrible publishing platform, and a wretched place to get news, and that’s because Facebook has many readers, and that’s all a marketing platform need do, if the cost per viewer is zero. I haven’t used Twitter as an author and have read precious few Tweets, but it strikes me, and always has, that a platform that can host automated accounts that cannot easily be detected is not a platform that has placed a high value on trustworthiness, and I think there must be a relatively high level of trust in order for any kind of communications platform to ultimately be successful and respectable – the National Enquirer may be successful, but only the credulous pay it any heed, even if it did break the Senator Edwards story, and the fact that it remains successful suggests there are many credulous people in this country. The many descriptions of Twitter overall suggests that this observation has borne out, and I suspect in it will not be a long-term player. The other platforms? No experience. Given that academic research, as well as anecdotal reports, suggest that social media is not a positive in our lives; for me, it’s suggestive of social evolution visiting a dead-end, and now slowly backing out.
From a larger perspective, I have to believe we’re seeing the results of the private sector intruding too deeply into the free press sector. Recalling my hobby horse concerning how the sectors of society – private, governmental, health, free press, educational – I believe we’re seeing, in the temporary shrinkage of blogging, the interference of the private sector with the free press. The exigencies of society – even excellence – requires the use of capitalism as part of the free press, but the intrusion of the processes of the private sector into the free press is palpably warping and destroying parts of the free press.
Consider the monetization of clicks, of views, and how this warps and, apparently, eventually destroys some of the publishing platforms on the webs. These metrics are at least partially motivated by those who seek to set ad rates, no? Advertisers will not buy ad space on a site without knowing the size and suitability of the audience. So now publishers and editors are motivated to publish content that will expand the audience – and this is not necessarily a process that leads to excellent writing. That is, the reward is not for better and better writing and the accompanying investigatory skills – which is not always easy to measure – but simply views of the given page. Easy to measure, but not a great motivation for improving one’s journalistic skills, or for that matter the output of a magazine.
But Andrew suggests buying subscriptions, and by paying ahead for the journalistic skills of the writers, there is a motivation to improve the free press output without the constant pressure of views or clicks. You put out the best you have, and if the subscriptions are renewed, then you know you’re doing well. If they’re not renewed, then you go under.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a far sight better than the path technology has taken us, I suspect. Have you considered opening a new subscription to a magazine or newspaper lately? Let me know.
