Category Archives: Culture

Breaking the News follow-up

October 10, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links, News Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

My post on James Fallows’ Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy generated a fair amount of e-mail and commentary. In the comments section, Steve Karger pointed to The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get, which rehashes of some of Fallows’ points but without acknowledgement except at the top, which has a quote, and the very bottom of the page, which says “With fond apologies to James Fallows.” Nonetheless, it’s worth reading.

I found What should be “the new rules of news” in The Guardian, one of the UK’s major newspapers. I especially like this rule:

3. Transparency would be a core element of our journalism. One example of many: every print article would have an accompanying box called “Things We Don’t Know,” a list of questions our journalists couldn’t answer in their reporting. TV and radio stories would mention the key unknowns. Whatever the medium, the organisation’s website would include an invitation to the audience to help fill in the holes, which exist in every story.

Sadly, its recommendations seem unlikely to come to pass: the incentives against better journalism seem too deeply entrenched, especially compared with the cost of real journalism.

Salon.com reports that “Journalists like Evan Thomas now admit the Clinton scandals were bogus. When will they admit they played along?” And the answer appears to be “never.” These kinds of retrospective pieces remind us of what’s wrong with the news business: reporters are participating in the practices that weaken confidence in the business, much like individual investors who make decisions that collectively shake the market’s foundation yet are personally beneficially.

Finally, Fallows himself caught my post and wrote in reply:

I have thought several times about revising or updating the book but have held back for two reasons. One is the shark-like instinct that it’s worth always moving ahead to new territory. The other, that the central points to make remain the same; the details would differ and be more depressing.

He’s correct, and others have been gathering plenty of fresh examples, as “The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get” shows. I have no idea what arrangements he has with his publisher, but perhaps a new edition with a new forward/afterward would a) give a reason for additional coverage of the book and b) give the benefit of a small number of new examples without having to overhaul the entire thing. Then again, as far as I can tell, Breaking the News got a fairly loud reception the first time and the problems it discusses are fairly well-known, so maybe this wouldn’t matter much.

As I said in my first post, I think the individual’s response to lousy news is likely to be limited, since I can’t immediately make structural changes in the big news organizations that produce lousy “news,” which some people seem to prefer, like Fox News. But if you are interested in better news, try The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal (which still seems pretty good) and the New York Times.

Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy — James Fallows

October 4, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , 12 Comments

The weird thing about Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy is how timely it still seems—I think Thoreau called books “the news that stays news.”* Even after some of the particulars Fallows wrote about have receded—like, say, the healthcare debate—the main point that news celebrities and TV-style have cheapened, perhaps dangerously, American knowledge and democracy remains. More importantly, the habit of political score-keeping rather than dealing with substantive issues remains too; Fallows quotes a Clinton administration staffer who said after the 1994 Republic landslide:

They [meaning voters] had ‘made the monkey jump’—they were able to discipline an institution they didn’t like. They could register the fact that they were unhappy. There doesn’t seem to be any way to do that with the press, except to stop watching and reading, which more and more people have done.

The process seems to have accelerated: i part that’s because of the Internet—people have more choices for news—but I wonder if it’s also in part because of the product being produced. Fallows gives an excellent sample of what TV news is like: mostly chasing sensation and catastrophe that doesn’t really mean anything, or have any nuance: there’s no real ambiguity concerning whether a killer should be caught and punished, or that a tornado is a tragedy. As Fallows says, “Then there is political news, almost always in the context of horse race politics—the mayor is criticizing his opponents, the city council is arguing with the mayor.” But over what? And why? The scorecard aspect ignores these important issues.

I’m not giving specific examples from Breaking the News because they’re too involved for a (relatively) short blog post, and the most specific parts of the specific examples have changed. But Fallows gives numerous anecdotes and stories to back his points, and it’s almost impossible to have seen TV news over the last ten years and not nod in agreement. The only place he fails in his proscriptions for working past the problems; most revolve around the idea of public journalism, which involves greater citizen participation in news topics, commitment to real information, and so forth. The major problem appears to be that most of the public doesn’t seem interested in such subjects, or at least in paying for them. Those who are interested subscribe to The Atlantic (Fallows’ current home), or, today, find what they need on specialized Internet forums. Most people appear interested in celebrity gossip and hating whatever “the other side” is doing.

For me, Hacker News does a better job of finding what’s worthy than all but a handful of publications (The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The New York Times being the most obvious). But Hacker News is only an aggregator, not an originator. Despite strides being made by blogging, it hasn’t come close to replace media organizations—in part because of lawsuit threats that can stymie the proverbial little guy.

As Jack Shafer says on Slate, “Among the many glorious things about American journalism is that no credentialing organization or regulatory body stands between an individual who wants to break a story and his public reporting of it.” This is true: but it’s also true that the “big media,” much as hate using that phrase, has disproportionate power—especially television. And the media business (another unfortunate phrase) doesn’t seem able to reform itself, so the Internet is doing part of the job for it. Still, media companies are in the business of giving people what they want, or at least what they seem to want, and what people seem to want is to have their prejudices massaged, whether by Fox News or MSNBC. And the status conveyed by TV (which Fallows deals with in a chapter titled “The Gravy Train;” one consultant says of pundits, “Every time they vanish from the tube for a period of time, the requests for their speaking and lectures drop off dramatically.” In other words, appearing on TV is insanely lucrative) means that far more people want to get on than can get on. The result: you can get people to do or say almost everything. As Shafer says, no professional body will stop you. But if people become more accustomed to unfiltered material on the net, maybe they’ll grow more tired of the news blowhards.

Against these problems, the individual doesn’t have a tremendous amount he or she can immediately do. “Don’t watch TV, or at least most TV news” is an obvious one that’s akin to telling people to eat their broccoli, even as McDonald’s continues to expand like waistlines. But, as any community organizer knows, making people aware of a problem is often an important step in solving it. Fallows made people aware of this problem in 1996. Alas: too little has changed. Maybe this post is another step, however tiny, in the direction of change for the better.

* This quote is probably slightly wrong, or wrongly attributed. Maybe he was the one who said, “Read not the times. Read the eternities.”

Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters — Scott Rosenberg

September 20, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In “Why and How to Write a Blog,” I said that “blogging is the genre that can subsume any other genre if you want it to.” It is to fact what the novel is to fiction or stories. But the development of the blog is underreported and Say Everything attempts to rectify that situation by tracing some of the early blogs and positing that while “blogging looked inconsequential and sounded ridiculous, […] it turned out to matter.” That blogging matters seems hard to argue against, given how many people do it and how blogging has democratized information by making the process of learning about a field easier. But how blogging comes to matter and where it might go is a much harder task and one that Say Everything probably hasn’t accomplished.

Of the three parts in Say Everything’s subtitle, the book only does one really well: how blogging began and where it’s been, on a factual level, since then. “What it’s becoming” is really too broad for anyone to guess: answers tend to range from “the media” to “everything” to “nothing” to the one that seems most probable to me: “who knows?” People barely had any idea of where computers would go in the 1970s, or where networking would go in the 1980s, or where the Internet would go in the 1990s. To presume that we know where something as amorphous as blogging will go in the 2000s seems unlikely. The final subtitle, “Why it matters,” ought to be obvious to anyone with any sense of history: communications revolutions tend to beget other kinds of social and cultural revolutions (see, for example, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change for an earlier example). When you can’t (easily) control what people are saying or how they’re saying it or who they’re distributing it too, interesting and unusual things start to happen. We’re barely at the infancy of that process in terms of blogging: that it matters shouldn’t even be arguable anymore. The question should be “how will it matter?”, but that merely leads us back to the problems associated with subtitle number two.

In Coders at Work, JavaScript and badass programmer Douglas Crockford says that “I think we’re tragically unaware of our history, and I’m often really disappointed to see that people who are now practicing this craft having no intellectual curiosity about where this stuff came from…” He’s referring to programming languages, but he could just as well refer to bloggers, who often suffer from the same kind of implicit and incorrect ahistoricism. Although it might be short on analysis, maybe blogging isn’t ready for the kind of deep interpretation that good professional historians bring to their subjects. Hell, maybe blogging itself isn’t mature enough to bring those tools to bear, or those bloggers who might (like professional historians) are too busy in other mediums that reward depth to bother with the intense research and thought such an effort would require.

Still, Rosenberg might be setting the stage for those deep analyses by giving us some facts before those facts disappear into the online morass: he’s giving us memories that might be hard to find today, let alone ten or twenty years from now. Say Everything threw surprises even at me, someone who has been using the Internet and reading one of the early blogs (Slashdot) since the mid 1990s. Before I could drive, I could post to Usenet. Yet I didn’t know how important Dave Winer was and is for the blogging tools that exist now, like RSS, which I use daily. If blogging is going to grow as a discipline, we need someone to bring together its broad early contours in a single place. Bloggers seem unlikely to do it on our own, or, if we do, the pieces of the conversation will be too scattered. One thing books are really good at doing by virtue of their length is bringing those pieces together in one place. Even posts like this much-cited one, on how the blogosphere has changed in the last six years, doesn’t really give much background.

One of the most fascinating passages in Say Everything is actually a quote from Justin Hall:

What if a deeply connective personal activity you do, that’s like religion, that you practice with yourself, that’s a dialogue with the divine, turns out to drive people away from you? … I published my life on the fucking internet. And it doesn’t make people wanna be with me. It makes people not trust me. And I don’t know what the fuck to do about it . . .

Hall is overly grandiose (“that’s like religion”), but it nonetheless rings true and reminds me of a New York Times story I can’t find right now about someone who decided to throw a party and only invite Facebook “friends,” and then discovered that no one showed up. This raises the question: are they really your friends? Maybe one needs to find the medium place where one can write usefully* online, but where one doesn’t necessarily write everything. In other words, just because you can say anything doesn’t mean you should.

Later in the same section, Rosenberg says that “Hall had always dedicated a big chunk of his time and pages to teaching and proselytizing for his faith in self-expression on the web,” and that his “calling to public autobiography was driven in part by the trauma of a parental suicide.” Maybe: but I’m not sure how parental suicide would lead one to public autobiography, and I find it fascinating that Hall’s public autobiography ultimately prevented him from forging closer relationships with others, which in turn broke at least some of the faith described in the first sentence. If the public autobiography isn’t good for close relationships, maybe people strongly inclined toward barring all in the blogs will realize the hard way what journalists and writers have long known: that to do one’s best work, or to do it over the long term, one needs to keep some private reserve in reserve, or at least in reserve for someone else who might value that reserve for its scarcity.

Others have trouble with relearning as well; Rosenberg echoes Paul Graham’s How to Disagree when he says “Any public career online is going to attract a certain volume of drive-by flak; potentially useful criticism is likely to be hopelessly tangled personal invective.” Dave Winer of Scripting News apparently didn’t know that, and Rosenberg slips into cliche when he says that Winer “took nearly every putdown to heart.” But that’s not just the nature of “any public career online,” but any public career: politicians, for example, deal with drive-by idiocy all the time. One could even take those attacks as a sign of success; as David Segal observes in Call It Ludacris: The Kinship Between Talk Radio and Rap:

You’re nobody in hip-hop until you claim to have hordes of detractors. The paradox, of course, is that the artists who regularly denounce their haters have a huge and adoring audience. How does Lil Wayne complain in song about the legions who seek his ruin even as he dominates the charts? Ask Michael Savage, who is forever describing himself as an underdog, marginalized by the media — on the more than 300 stations that carry his show.

You have to let it roll, or use it to boost your ego. Furthermore, if you respond too seriously to it, or begin to believe in your own messianic power, you’ll face a different problem. As Rosenberg says of Winer, “[T]elling-it-like-it-is can easily tempt you over the edge into meanness.” In other words, if you lack tact, you can come across as a jerk even if you’re right, and if you lack sufficient intellectual playfulness,

These main points are the stronger parts of Say Everything, the sections that make you want to keep reading past the sometimes tedious recitations of everyday blogging (does anyone really care about the specifics of Winer vs. the haters fights?). Me neither. Consequently, I suspect the audience for Say Everything is relatively limited to bloggers themselves, scholars with an interest in the media, and journalists looking for a way forward. A fourth category might be useful too: the clueless but powerful whose work brings them into contact with bloggers but who have no idea what’s happening in the medium. Now, instead of spending 20 hours trying to find blog posts about the history of blogging, one can point at a book and say, “at least for the time being, this will tell you about the history of blogging.” And that reminds us at least in part about some of blogging’s present limitations, especially relative to books.

* Whatever this means. Defining a term like “usefully” could take an entire essay in an of itself. But this post is a very small part of a very broad effort at defining the generic boundaries and conventions of blogging, so maybe someone else will take me up on the point of what “useful” blogging could entail.

Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters — Scott Rosenberg

September 20, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In Why and How to Write a Blog, I said that “blogging is the genre that can subsume any other genre if you want it to.” It is to fact what the novel is to fiction or stories. But the development of the blog is an underreported phenomenon, at least on a broader scale, and Say Everything attempts to rectify that situation by tracing some of the early blogs and positing that while “blogging looked inconsequential and sounded ridiculous, […] it turned out to matter.” That blogging matters seems hard to argue against, given how many people do it and how blogging has democratized information by making the process of learning about a field easier. But how blogging comes to matter and where it might go is a much harder task and one that Say Everything probably hasn’t accomplished.

Of the three parts in Say Everything’s subtitle, the book only does one really well: how blogging began and where it’s been, on a factual level, since then. “What it’s becoming” is really too broad for anyone to guess: answers tend to range from “the media” to “everything” to “nothing” to the one that seems most probable to me: “who knows?” People barely had any idea of where computers would go in the 1970s, or where networking would go in the 1980s, or where the Internet would go in the 1990s. To presume that we know where something as amorphous as blogging will go in the 2000s seems unlikely. The final subtitle, “Why it matters,” ought to be obvious to anyone with any sense of history: communications revolutions tend to beget other kinds of social and cultural revolutions (see, for example, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change for an earlier example). When you can’t (easily) control what people are saying or how they’re saying it or who they’re distributing it too, interesting and unusual things start to happen. We’re barely at the infancy of that process in terms of blogging: that it matters shouldn’t even be arguable anymore. The question should be “how will it matter?”, but that merely leads us back to the problems associated with subtitle number two.

In Coders at Work, JavaScript and badass programmer Douglas Crockford says that “I think we’re tragically unaware of our history, and I’m often really disappointed to see that people who are now practicing this craft having no intellectual curiosity about where this stuff came from…” He’s referring to programming languages, but he could just as well refer to bloggers, who often suffer from the same kind of implicit and incorrect ahistoricism. Although it might be short on analysis, maybe blogging isn’t ready for the kind of deep interpretation that good professional historians bring to their subjects. Hell, maybe blogging itself isn’t mature enough to bring those tools to bear, or those bloggers who might (like professional historians) are too busy in other mediums that reward depth to bother with the intense research and thought such an effort would require.

Still, Rosenberg might be setting the stage for those deep analyses by giving us some facts before those facts disappear into the online morass: he’s giving us memories that might be hard to find today, let alone ten or twenty years from now. Say Everything threw surprises even at me, someone who has been using the Internet and reading one of the early blogs (Slashdot) since the mid 1990s. Before I could drive, I could post to Usenet. Yet I didn’t know how important Dave Winer was and is for the blogging tools that exist now, like RSS, which I use daily. If blogging is going to grow as a discipline, we need someone to bring together its broad early contours in a single place. Bloggers seem unlikely to do it on our own, or, if we do, the pieces of the conversation will be too scattered. One thing books are really good at doing by virtue of their length is bringing those pieces together in one place. Even posts like this much-cited one, on how the blogosphere has changed in the last six years, doesn’t really give much background.

One of the most fascinating passages in Say Everything is actually a quote from Justin Hall:

What if a deeply connective personal activity you do, that’s like religion, that you practice with yourself, that’s a dialogue with the divine, turns out to drive people away from you? … I published my life on the fucking internet. And it doesn’t make people wanna be with me. It makes people not trust me. And I don’t know what the fuck to do about it . . .

Hall is overly grandiose (“that’s like religion”), but it nonetheless rings true and reminds me of a New York Times story I can’t find right now about someone who decided to throw a party and only invite Facebook “friends,” and then discovered that no one showed up. This raises the question: are they really your friends? Maybe one needs to find the medium place where one can write usefully* online, but where one doesn’t necessarily write everything. In other words, just because you can say anything doesn’t mean you should.

Later in the same section, Rosenberg says that “Hall had always dedicated a big chunk of his time and pages to teaching and proselytizing for his faith in self-expression on the web,” and that his “calling to public autobiography was driven in part by the trauma of a parental suicide.” Maybe: but I’m not sure how parental suicide would lead one to public autobiography, and I find it fascinating that Hall’s public autobiography ultimately prevented him from forging closer relationships with others, which in turn broke at least some of the faith described in the first sentence. If the public autobiography isn’t good for close relationships, maybe people strongly inclined toward barring all in the blogs will realize the hard way what journalists and writers have long known: that to do one’s best work, or to do it over the long term, one needs to keep some private reserve in reserve, or at least in reserve for someone else who might value that reserve for its scarcity.

Others have trouble with relearning as well; Rosenberg echoes Paul Graham’s How to Disagree when he says “Any public career online is going to attract a certain volume of drive-by flak; potentially useful criticism is likely to be hopelessly tangled personal invective.” Dave Winer of Scripting News apparently didn’t know that, and Rosenberg slips into cliche when he says that Winer “took nearly every putdown to heart.” But that’s not just the nature of “any public career online,” but any public career: politicians, for example, deal with drive-by idiocy all the time. One could even take those attacks as a sign of success; as David Segal observes in Call It Ludacris: The Kinship Between Talk Radio and Rap:

You’re nobody in hip-hop until you claim to have hordes of detractors. The paradox, of course, is that the artists who regularly denounce their haters have a huge and adoring audience. How does Lil Wayne complain in song about the legions who seek his ruin even as he dominates the charts? Ask Michael Savage, who is forever describing himself as an underdog, marginalized by the media — on the more than 300 stations that carry his show.

You have to let it roll, or use it to boost your ego. Furthermore, if you respond too seriously to it, or begin to believe in your own messianic power, you’ll face a different problem. As Rosenberg says of Winer, “[T]elling-it-like-it-is can easily tempt you over the edge into meanness.” In other words, if you lack tact, you can come across as a jerk even if you’re right, and if you lack sufficient intellectual playfulness,

These main points are the stronger parts of Say Everything, the sections that make you want to keep reading past the sometimes tedious recitations of everyday blogging (does anyone really care about the specifics of Winer vs. the haters fights?). Me neither. Consequently, I suspect the audience for Say Everything is relatively limited to bloggers themselves, scholars with an interest in the media, and journalists looking for a way forward. A fourth category might be useful too: the clueless but powerful whose work brings them into contact with bloggers but who have no idea what’s happening in the medium. Now, instead of spending 20 hours trying to find blog posts about the history of blogging, one can point at a book and say, “at least for the time being, this will tell you about the history of blogging.” And that reminds us at least in part about some of blogging’s present limitations, especially relative to books.

* Whatever this means. Defining a term like “usefully” could take an entire essay in an of itself. But this post is a very small part of a very broad effort at defining the generic boundaries and conventions of blogging, so maybe someone else will take me up on the point of what “useful” blogging could entail.

Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard

August 29, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

In my essay on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I cited his Wall Street Journal article Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard:

It’s not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it’s something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us “The Age of Innocence,” “Ulysses,” “A Passage to India,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sound and the Fury.” Not to mention most of “In Search of Lost Time” and all of Kafka’s novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between “The Professor’s House,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Arrowsmith” and “An American Tragedy.” (It went to “Arrowsmith.” Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

Read the whole thing. I’m drawing special attention to it because there are few essays I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, that I agree with more, ranging from Grossman’s analysis of the current situation to its historical roots to his call for future action.

The next step is B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto.

EDIT: See also Jeff’s excellent comment.

Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard

August 29, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In my essay on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I cited his Wall Street Journal article Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard:

It’s not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it’s something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us “The Age of Innocence,” “Ulysses,” “A Passage to India,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sound and the Fury.” Not to mention most of “In Search of Lost Time” and all of Kafka’s novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between “The Professor’s House,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Arrowsmith” and “An American Tragedy.” (It went to “Arrowsmith.” Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

Read the whole thing. I’m drawing special attention to it because there are few essays I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, that I agree with more, ranging from Grossman’s analysis of the current situation to its historical roots to his call for future action.

If you haven’t clicked the link, you shouldn’t be reading this. Once you have clicked it, however, consider the next step: B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto.

EDIT: See also Jeff’s excellent comment.

Philip Greenspun's Why I'm Not a Writer and Hacker News

August 23, 2009 By in Academia, Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

I submitted a Hacker News (HN) link to Philip Greenspun’s essay Why I’m Not a Writer, which begins:

I’m not a writer. Sometimes I write, but I don’t define myself as a career writer. And that isn’t because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of an obscure writer. It is because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of a successful writer.

He’s right. The garret lifestyle is one reason (there are many others too) why so many writers are now affiliated with universities, as detailed in Mark McGurl’s excellent book The Program Era. In fact, university affiliation has become so pervasive that Neal Stephenson told this hilarious story on the subject in a Slashdot interview:

[… A] while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where do you teach?” just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another “And which distro do you use?”

I was taken aback. “I don’t teach anywhere,” I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. “Then what do you do?”

“I’m…a writer,” I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

“Yes, but what do you do?”

I couldn’t think of how to answer the question—I’d already answered it!

“You can’t make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?” she tried.

“From…being a writer,” I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn’t snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

In the HN thread, another poster named Quantumhobbit linked to Orson Scott Card dealing with the same subject. As Quantumhobbit says, “Basically his advice is make sure you have another source of income, such as a rich uncle, before you decide to become a full-time writer. There is no guaranty that you will make enough to support yourself, even in genre writing.”

But the most interesting response comes from Gwern, who said, “I note that [Greenspun’s essay is] from 1996, when the bubble was getting hot; are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?” In reply, I said:

I think that the date of Greenspun’s essay is indicative of how little has changed, rather than how much. Most writers didn’t make very much money then, and they still don’t, which many people don’t seem to realize; one writer friend who also teaches university classes recently wrote to me and said that a colleague had asked, in all seriousness, if he was rich now that he’d written a book. Writers often work like astronauts to achieve relatively modest financial success, which people like the poster in the original HN thread might want to know before getting started in earnest at trying to write for the book market. Take a look at these posts from a guy who works in the sales department of a major publishing house regarding current advances for most types of fiction.

“are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?”

Depends on what you mean by “panned out” and “screwed”; I can’t really tell from the nature of the question. If you mean, “Do I think writers can make enough from the Internet to support themselves?” the answer is yes; if you mean, “Will many of them do so, especially relative to the number who would like to?” the answer is “no.” In fact, I even wrote a blog post at Grant Writing Confidential on the subject of how unlikely it is for people to make money from blogging.

(Note: the above is slightly edited from the original.)

Gwern replied:

But to expand on what I meant: I remember that back in the dot-com bubble, the bubble Greenspan wrote that essay in, there was a lot of enthusiasm and hype about how the future would be so much better for authors and artists than the old world of offline publishing – the Web would empower creators, cut out the middlemen, and channel tons of money to them, via the magic of 0-cost publishing, micropayments, and other things like search engines or aggregators. Greenspan’s essay seems to buy into that zeitgeist, albeit relatively modestly.

Of course, that vision has largely come failed to come true (spectacularly so in the case of micropayments and agents). I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it’s being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved.

That wasn’t my point, but if I’d been smarter it would’ve been. Half the 1996 equation Gwern describes has come true: the web has vastly empowered writers’ ability to reach readers (and consultants’ ability to reach clients). But it definitely hasn’t channeled vast amounts of money to most writers, and many kinds of writers—like professional journalists—are being laid off en-masse.

In the world of the web, as in the 1849 California gold rush, the people who make real money aren’t the people panning for gold, but the people selling equipment to and building infrastructure for the people panning for gold. So too with online writing: Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, which drives this blog, probably makes or will make far more than anyone writing on it.

All of this could probably be appended to advice for a very very beginning writer. I think that knowledge for its own sake is valuable, even, or maybe especially, for artists.

Crooked Timber on George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For?

August 5, 2009 By in Academia, Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve ordered What Are Intellectuals Good For? thanks to the many insightful posts at Crooked Timber. See examples here, here, here, and here. I don’t understand all of the arguments well enough to contribute to them—at least not yet—especially those regarding what the political “left” means, which seems based a cursory reading more out of the 1930s or 1950s than today. This might be a function of my age—I’m not a professor (yet?)—or field—English literature—rather than philosophy or government, where most of the Crooked Timber contributors appear to be ensconced.

Of late there have been a large number of posts around the web worthy of more than a brief link, but I think that’s an aberration rather than a permanent trend. Expect more on What Are Intellectuals Good For? shortly, as well as longer essays on books rather than the recent spate of responses to other bloggers/commenters.

Crooked Timber on George Scialabba’s What Are Intellectuals Good For?

August 5, 2009 By in Academia, Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve ordered What Are Intellectuals Good For? thanks to the many insightful posts at Crooked Timber. See examples here, here, here, and here. I don’t understand all of the arguments well enough to contribute to them—at least not yet—especially those regarding what the political “left” means, which seems based a cursory reading more out of the 1930s or 1950s than today. This might be a function of my age—I’m not a professor (yet?)—or field—English literature—rather than philosophy or government, where most of the Crooked Timber contributors appear to be ensconced.

Of late there have been a large number of posts around the web worthy of more than a brief link, but I think that’s an aberration rather than a permanent trend. Expect more on What Are Intellectuals Good For? shortly, as well as longer essays on books rather than the recent spate of responses to other bloggers/commenters.

Careers—and careerism—in academia and criticism

July 30, 2009 By in Academia, Critics, Culture, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Careers in criticism examines what D.G. Myers thinks can be done about the possible problem of lousy literary criticism. It’s worth reading, but I suspect that the other problem, which goes undiscussed in this post, is the difficulty of deciding what is good criticism: many people complain that lots of academic and other criticism is bad (I probably count myself in their ranks much of the time), but they tend to disagree with what would be good in its stead. Deciding is particularly hard in a field where wildly divergent ideas of what constitutes quality exists. Therefore you get… gridlock, high school politics, and so forth.

How to solve this? Myers says:

[Elberry] thinks that I am suggesting that “critics should write about less well-known books,” but I suggest this only as a method, a practical expedient, for undertaking their real responsibility: namely, to contribute to literary knowledge. The demand upon critics (in the university and out) must be, not to “write something new and different,” but to add something new and different to the store of human understanding.

I bet that most people who are writing just to “write something new and different” would argue they are adding to the store of human knowledge. I definitely agree with Myers’ formulation on a high level but am not sure how to implement this on a lower level. The best ideas I can come up resolve issues in academic publishing: right now, it can take years to publish an essay in a peer-reviewed journal, which then locks it behind pay walls on the Internet. The length raises the obvious and uncomfortable question: if it takes three years to publish a paper, is the paper really that important? That this process takes forever is hardly new; Lucky Jim mocked it in the 1950s.

My solution: have peer-reviewed journals “publish” online, and have publication be a link to the author’s paper on the author’s website. The journal’s editor could also copy that paper to their own site after anonymous peer review. That way, the information is freely available, especially to people in countries where most universities can’t afford journal subscriptions under the present model; the theoretical “size” of a journal could be limitless, although the practicalities of reading would probably still limit that size; there would still be a recognized body of work that makes up, say “Modern Fiction Studies;” and the journal could still issue a print edition every n months or years for those who prefer it. This would cause the journal to lose the revenue stream that currently comes from publishers, but that stream seems to be so small that universities could replace it in return for the prestige of housing the journal. Alternately, the exceedingly low cost of web publishing—one could buy server hosting with 200GB+ per month transfer limits and so forth for $100/month—could obviate the (relatively) high cost structures that journals already have while reducing barriers to entry.

Current top-notch journals have no incentive to adopt this model, as it would challenge their hegemony, but if lesser journals began adopting it and scholars preferred it, the quality in my wiki-like journal would rise, and competition might force top-notch journals to adopt the same strategies if they’re going to retain their position. Since publishing in English lit seems mostly a prestige and influence game, this strategy has few drawbacks I can perceive. If anyone knows of a reputable journal (which is to say: one backed by a university with at least a few years of regular publication) that’s already doing this, I’d love to hear about it.

The other change is one I read about in Freakonomics, the blog: require peer reviewers to say publish/no publish on each paper, and give comments, rather than giving comments with the implication that, if they’re not taken, one will automatically be rejected. Rather than having a three- to four-draft round-robin time-waster of questionable benefit, a peer reviewer would have to say “yes/no,” on the first iteration in its current condition, and the reviewer’s comments would be an option rather than requirement. This structural change seems less important than the one above.

Anyway, given that I’m in grad school for English lit, expect more on this topic in the future, since I’m now tasting the peer review that many others have called bitter and find that they’re mostly right.

EDIT: Myers has a follow-up post, with a response to some of my comments, here.