A Style of Looking

May 5th, 2008BusinessWeek, Design, General

“I guarantee there’s non-crap out there.”

Lanky and famously kinetic, Jeff Jarvis is holding court at the BusinessWeek offices in midtown Manhattan, conducting a teaching session entitled, “The Art and Science of Blogging.” The room is filled with reporters, editors, and the likes of me; 50-some-odd “institutional” bloggers in all. I’m in the middle of the crowd, nodding my head in agreement as vigorously as I can without making the folks around me suspect I’ve got a medical condition.

Same As It Ever Was

If there really is such a thing as a genuine tension between Old Media and New (for those of us manning the news desks of the former) it’s centered squarely around the meme his quip was addressing. The response to an oft-uttered, yet specious ad hominem about blogs that goes something like, “But there’s so much crap online.”

Oh, really? There may be truth in that, but compared to what? Let’s take a look…

As I type this, the most recent issues of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Columbia Journalism Review, Good, Mother Jones, and (of course) BusinessWeek, are sitting on my couch. Yes, I will read all of them. It’s a serious commitment of time and energy. Will I read each and every article? Absolutely not. Because, while there’s plenty of gold in them thar pages, there’s also plenty of noise.

And that’s different from my interaction with online sources how, exactly?

Only by virtue of the fact that online technology enables greater volume and velocity. It merely extends existing conditions in media, accelerates them. (And as with many great technological leaps forward, the scaling-up happened so suddenly that it blocked the obviousness of these parallels for many of the participants.) These factors don’t ipso facto speak to quality. Don’t confuse volume with ratios. (And while we’re at it, don’t confuse a technology—blog software—with a writing style. But we’ll table that discussion for now.)

It’s a variation on a great zinger someone shot my way over a cup of coffee once: “Crap is media agnostic.” (Rearranged for those with delicate sensibilities, it could run, “Every medium has equal potential to inform poorly.”) Turn on the TV or walk into the local bookstore and you’ll find much the same as you do online (as Jarvis went on to point out). Plenty of twaddle to go ‘round. Plenty of value too, if you know what you’re digging for.

How Do I Work This?

And therein lies the point. In order to be a savvy consumer of those magazines sitting on my couch, or any other medium, I need to develop a style of looking. Otherwise I’m destined to drown on the business end of the metaphorical fire hose—whether its dead trees or ephemeral electrons doing me in.

People already know this. Ask most savvy consumers and they’ll tell you they never expected everything being shoveled their way would be fit for consumption. They understand the need to be informed consumers—finicky eaters—in order to pan the gold dust out of the stream. (Mixed metaphor alert.)

So why do people forget this when they start talking about online? Why are sweeping dismissals still so common?

This Is Not My Beautiful House

My own pet theory is that the filtering mechanisms people have built up for other mediums are so well established that they’ve become transparent. Nearly automatic and unconscious, some don’t even know they’re doing it. Then this new package arrives (same contents, mind you) and suddenly they’re seeing the forest for the trees again. Taking in the totality of what it contains, they’re shocked.

Seeing the same phenomenon in a new form forces people to witness it with fresh eyes. It’s a lot like coming home after a long vacation and finding your home a little unfamiliar. (“Wow, we really should throw a fresh coat of paint on these walls…”)

But don’t confuse the content with the conveyance. It’s the same old story, just in a different box. There’s piffle, there’s pay dirt, and then there’s the part you choose to pay attention to.

Comments

zeldman August 3rd, 2008 at 11:34 am

Great piece, David. I wish millions of people would read this post. Or at least thousands of the right people.

Besides blindness born of newness, there’s also a fear factor.

When MIDI came out in the early 1980s, Joseph Zawinul of Weather Report said, “Now any fool can pull the trigger.”

What he meant was, you no longer needed to be a trained, practiced, highly proficient, deeply knowledgeable performer to make music. He was right. And it had always been true: three-chord garage rock did not require massive proficiency. Nor did most of the folk music that most of the world had listened to for most of human time on earth. But it wasn’t true in jazz, or in the hybrid jazz-and-funk-spawned genre Weather Report helped define. Jazz and fusion required monster chops and deep musical knowledge. MIDI equalized the way punk had equalized a decade earlier. And this equalization threatened or at least pissed off serious musicians at the time: drum machines were going to put drummers out of work, Zappa was a prick for replacing his live band with a Synclavier, etc.

Twenty years later, we know that no music put any other music out of business: the broadening of possibilities represented by mainstream push-button electronic music simply created new listeners and gave old listeners something new to listen to if they chose.

Likewise, internet publishing hasn’t killed magazine publishing and never will. But journalism budgets continue to be cut, as they have been since Reagan, and “the crap they publish on the web” makes an easy scapegoat for journalists and newspaper ad sales people. The trouble with this scapegoat is the trouble with all scapegoats: blaming the wrong enemy is not only unjust, it wastes the energy you might have spent solving your problem (if only you had identified the true enemy).

zeldman August 3rd, 2008 at 11:36 am

All that said, a lot of crap is being published on the web, for the same reason a lot of doggie nutsacks are being licked by their owners (because they can).

David Sleight August 4th, 2008 at 1:15 am

Thanks much! And very well put, sir.

When it comes to the fear aspect, the solution can be boiled down to a brutal yet simple principle: Adapt or Die. (Unless of course these same folks really do enjoy discovering how the dinosaurs felt right before the asteroid smacked into the Earth.)

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