"Satire was mostly dead in 2008 and its corpse is still cold today. What do people want in the future? I guess they want tweets."
Walkoff Walk, which is a baseball blog run by some smart guys who I like very much, is shutting down at the end of the month, and in this post co-proprietor Rob Iracane broke down how the rise of microblogging might have in part helped hasten the demise of the site—”Heck, our favorite people in the whole world, our thirty-or-so devoted commenters, are very well-represented on the Twittersphere and entertain one another all day long,” he wrote as a followup to the statement quoted above. But I also feel like these sorts of observations—and, more importantly, the directions taken by media outlets that are trying to gain a foothold in the world they describe—relate a Tweet that Patrick Stump sent out yesterday:
If more people would seek out good music, media would have better taste. People forget how much power they have over culture
I actually think this is something people don’t fully realize at the moment because of the sea change in the relationship between consumers and producers of media, which has been pretty rapid. Fifteen years ago, when I was still wondering why I had decided to enroll in journalism school, the idea of holding a focus-group session before figuring out the day’s news hole, and doing so every day, would have been absolutely anathema to the whole enterprise. Yet newsrooms all over the world—even the ones run and staffed by people who are paid professionals—now conduct a similar exercise on a daily, even hourly basis when they do things like check Twitter’s trending topics and Google Trends in order to figure out what they should be covering. (Shoot, during my 14-month exile from daily professional blogging this whole thing has changed dramatically.) Upstart media efforts aren’t, as a rule, being marketed in the broadcast manner—whether on TV or via a paper dropped on a doorstep every day—that so many legacy media outlets, and their workers, still take for granted; instead web sites that don’t have megarecognizable brands (Aol, Yahoo, NYT, maybe the WSJ) have to market themselves to readers on a case-by-case basis, saying, “hey, we wrote about this, and this and this and this as well, and thank you, please come again—no, really, we need you to come back.” There’s not much customer loyalty in the long term, and it’s devastating to any outlet’s bottom line.
Now, “up the empire” rhetoric aside, this is not really that good of a development (sorry, tech utopianists) (but not really). For one thing, tailoring news (and “news”) exactly to the populace’s desires can result in an unhealthy diet of information—the easy analogue is the kids who have gorged on candy, and whose stomachs are roaring yet they’re begging for just another bite when they should really eat some goddamn spinach. For another thing, the ability to obsessively measure what content people aren’t reading gives the topics and artists and narratives that are already familiar an unfair competitive advantage as far as getting covered; how can people search out things that they aren’t even sure that they’re seeking out? (This is sort of related to the paradox of music in 2011—music is everywhere, but there are many more places for it to get lost as there are for it to be found.) There’s also the Palin Paradox, in which people who have nothing to offer, but who rile up the populace, get covered—see also the coverage of Tila Tequila by “music” outlets, or the heinously misogynist way certain gossip blogs deal with certain starlets. (If only the media’s rules about trolling were as stringent as my favorite message boards’.) And finally, this sort of tailoring on a micro scale—as the Walkoff Walk post sort of noted-results in further fragmenting of the culture, with people more content to scurry into their own rabbitholes. Which is all well and great in a way since hey, people can call up their “My” pages more easily than before and easily find information on, say, medical conditions or protests on the other side of the world that might have been more obscured in the past, but it’s also worrisome as far as what gets left behind—not just in terms of media outlets and cultural efforts that are profitable enough to exist, but in terms of segments of the population who for whatever reason (class, language, having little to do with geek culture like 90% of the population) can’t get traction as far as making their desires known online, and whose needs thus get further left behind in favor of another story about a New York tech startup or a Kardashian.
So yeah, I guess I miss a specific type of monoculture, or at least the safety net that allowed reporters of all stripes to cover news items and musicians and other things because they were interesting, and not because some algorithm whirring away in a server farm predicted that it would pay off with an ad-revenue bump. (Especially since the rise of noxious nontent sites like Examiner.com and its ilk mean that the likelihood of those gambles paying off is greatly diminshed.) And I know it’s gone, and I know that I’m probably being overly idyllic—there was a reason that so many young poptimist types got cheesed off at the old rock-crit establishment, after all. But I think it’s something that needs to be talked about in a way that’s more concrete. (I also feel like these posts about the state of the music blogosphere fit in tangentially with my argument, in a paradoxical “the widening of nets actually results in their contraction” way.)
