Posts tagged media
why today is better
The other day, I stumbled upon a website that initially induced feelings of aesthetic nausea, but after a few clicks, brought back what can only be described as a warm, if uneasy, nostalgia. It was a website chronicling old HTML sites from the early days of web 1.0, when oversized T-shirts were the rage, along with oversized <marquee> tags. A virtual graveyard of Geocities and AOL addresses.
And I remembered my own foray into programming. Like all of my friends, when I was 14 I had built my own HTML website, full of animated GIFs, scrolling text, and JPGs of Fox Mulder (future husband) and UFOs. And it had a guestbook, which had a wealth of inside jokes made by silly high school freshmen.
As far as I know, that site is gone, or at least gone from my eyes. I don’t have the original address, and I don’t even remember for sure whether it was on Geocities or another service. I tried some unsuccessful googling of former AIM screennames and my original Hotmail account, but it seems that my Internet infancy, like baby pictures lost in a fire, is gone forever.
But imagine if I were 14 today. As soon as I made my website, which, while lacking the obvious appeal of flashing GIFs and unstoppable MIDI theme songs, would undoubtedly be much more stylish, I would post it on Facebook, link to it from Twitter, and Gmail it to all of my friends. Then, years and years into the future, assuming I was spared in the robot apocalypse, I would just have to search my Gmail account for that original link and a part of my childhood would return.
So what I really, really don’t understand is the people who bemoan our times. Yes, everything is recorded. Yes, there might be a disturbing lack of privacy. But the Internet as a whole is a living record of each individual life, and the greatest storehouse of memories man has ever invented.
Each blog is a diary that your mom didn’t accidentally throw away. Each email from a lover is a letter that didn’t get lost in the move. And each personal website that’s created is a snapshot of the individual behind it during the span of its existence.
I realize that during every revolution, a majority of those living through it end up yearning for the “good old days”, even when those days aren’t that old and in hindsight turn out to not have been that good in the first place. But those who are in their 20s now or younger, those with at least the smallest ounce of tech savviness, should realize that we’re living in amazing times, and instead of hindering the revolution - or worse, whining about it - we should take full advantage, and leave our marks for generations to come.
“ My admittedly strange opinion is that we need to try harder with print. We can’t just give up on it. Inevitably there will be some loss of newspaper readership, but even that will stabilize. Not everyone wants all their news online. Do we all want to look at screens from 8am to 10pm? There’s room in the world for both online and paper. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. I guess that’s one of the things that’s always frustrating to hear, that the rise of the Internet means the death of print. There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality will be more nuanced. I think newspapers that adjust a bit will survive and still do great work. But we do need to give people reasons to pay money for the physical object. The landscape right now does require that we in the print world try harder. We have to think of the things that print does best, and do those things better than ever before. We need to use the paper, maximize the physical product.”
Maybe because I’m involved in both worlds, but again and again I can’t help but grasp the parallels between the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like in this quote by Dave Eggers, I can clearly see one way the latter can go.
Mp3s did not kill the CD. Hell, the CD didn’t even kill vinyl like everyone said it would. Sure, sales of both have gone down, which was inevitable when a non-material format was introduced that could be replicated indefinitely for free. But people buy vinyl for the sound, buy CDs for the artwork, buy either because they’re collectors or because they want to get the band’s autographs at the concert or for any number of reasons that translate to sales of physical products.
The same can be said for newspapers and books. How many people bought a copy of their local paper the day Obama was elected? Hell, mine is still hanging over my desk at work. How many people buy a new copy of a book they already own because a new edition has come out with a different cover and new forward by the author? Maybe not enough to single-handedly keep the industry afloat, but enough to ensure that print will not simply disappear overnight.
Like the obsessive record collector with shelves of alphabetically arranged vinyls, the obsessive bookworm will continue purchasing books. The obsessive news junkie will keep savoring the daily trip to the newsstand. But the industries need to adapt to a model when these people are a minority, not the majority. They need to be profitable, to be able pay musicians and journalists and editors based on a digital model, while still producing the physical objects for those who want to purchase them. It’s never going to be black or white, print or digital - the model needs to encompass both, but in different degrees than it has ever done before in the past.
a failure of society
It’s very easy to blame the American media for the failure of democracy that resulted in the past eight years; I’ve done that myself many times. But that’s only grasping a glimpse of the problem, and not the whole picture.
A properly functioning democracy relies on a well-informed public; the journalistic community exists to inform that public. It’s easy to say that the public is mostly full of idiots that do not want to be informed, but that’s also looking at a fraction of the puzzle.
The real problem lies in the fact that the journalistic community is tied to the same market forces as normal businesses. It means that a journalist’ first job becomes to sell papers/get network ratings up, when it should be to fuction as a check on the government’s actions. This is an elementary failure of our society, and if it is not corrected it will lead to its downfall.
Newspapers rely on advertisers’ money to survive; television news relies on ratings. Both have been steadily losing credibility over the years as their commercial aspects have been more and more emphasized.
The Internet, meanwhile, began with a lack of credibility, but as people begin to lose faith in traditional media, it has quickly gained ground. With the comparitavely lower costs of Internet journalism, this could easily become a viable alternative with the right organizational structure that checks for credibility. The only thing that’s missing now is the right filter…
