culture: July 2005 Archives

Newspapers are running scared -- we Xers just aren’t getting our news from print anymore, we don’t need the classifieds thanks to Craigslist... we’re just not cooperating in the great game newspapers have been playing of delivering eyeballs to advertisers.

The solution?

On July 6, [New York] Times managing editor Jill Abramson and associate managing editor Rick Berke convened a lunchtime gathering of the paper’s youngest writers -- including health-system-exposé scribe Michael Luo and social-trend-piece innovator Jennifer 8. Lee -- to urge them to put their stamp on the paper.

The morning that Judith Miller was heading to jail in the name of civil disobedience, Ms. Abramson was telling The Times’ youth corps to practice a little disobedience of its own. Her message, said a staffer who attended, was: "Don’t roll over to your editors. We’re the future of the paper."

"Not to start World War III with editors," Ms. Abramson said on the phone this week, "but I wanted to consciously send them a message that we want the paper to be full of engaging writing and engaging voices."

So, at a buffet luncheon of sushi, tandoori chicken and curried cauliflower in the paper’s 11th-floor dining room, Ms. Abramson admonished the junior set to resist the paper’s "stentorian voice."

"Jill encouraged us to be rebellious in our writing," the staffer said. "She told us we should fight back. If we want to do something risqué that editors clean up, we should push back."

The designated Wild Ones consisted of 16 staffers under the age of 30. Besides Mr. Luo and Ms. Lee, the group included business writers Andrew Ross Sorkin and Eric Dash, metro reporters Sewell Chan and Nicholas Confessore, arts reporter Lola Ogunnaike and Boldface Names scribe—and occasional cartoonist—Campbell Robertson.

Ms. Abramson said the meeting with the young Timespersons was part of a larger effort to get sharper prose into the pages. "It’s a feeling in general that I have," she said. "I’m talking about writing with style and some edge, and constantly looking for the most interesting way to frame stories."

[from The New York Observer]

The upshot, so far, appears to be an uptick in the snide condescension dripping from the Times toward things geeky. In today’s paper alone, we have Sarah Boxer, who pens lots and lots of vapid stuff about the Web for the paper, breaking the news that "Cats are the Web's it-animals. They're everywhere," and then offering some in-depth analysis for this striking cultural phenomenon:

Why cats and not dogs?

Remind you of anything? Those cats are like so many bloggers sitting at home staring into their computer screens and watching other bloggers blog other bloggers. Cats, who live indoors and love to prowl, are the soul of the blogosphere. Dogs would never blog.

[from The New York Times]

Yup, that’s the way to attract the online intelligentsia: insult them.

Or then there’s Kaavya Viswanathan, whom we’re told is "a sophomore at Harvard," and her revelatory op-ed that exposes an obscure literary endeavor from Britain:

It wasn't until "Chamber of Secrets" hit best-seller lists, the summer before I began eighth grade, that my dad brought the first two books home and persuaded me to read them.

Even though I'm now in college, and buried in a reading list that's more Proust than Potter, I made sure I got my copy of the "Half-Blood Prince" on July 16 and seriously considered taking a day off from my job to read.

[from The New York Times]

Yeah, so even though Harry Potter isn’t, like, Proust or anything, even Harvard sophomores are deigning to read it!

It feels to me that, increasingly, the Times is being written by alien visitors for their readers back on Planet Xigyjkqz, who may find themselves intrigued by this Internet thing that, oh, much of the population under 40 considers an integral part of their lives. How the paper expects to woo us back when it appears determined not to understand us is a hilarious mystery to me.

But perhaps if I change my name to MaryAnn 7 Johanson and start writing the most banal crap I can come up with about "the Web" -- hey, check out that Google, will ya?! -- I, too, will be feted with tandoori chicken and hailed as the savior of a dying institution.

Oh, this is an awesome takedown of the whole corporations-glomming-onto-the-blogging thing:

Memo to mainstream media: You don't get to blog.

And that's the fundamental failing of media company blogs: they aren't blogs in the proper sense and they utterly misapprehend what is fascinating about blogging.

[from Corante]

It’s long, but worth the read. Makes me feel all cutting edge...

The New York Times obviously continues to read Geek Philosophy. On July 8th, I wrote:

Some generations express themselves through poetry; others, through song. Xers use T-shirts.

And in Thurday’s Times:

Lately limited edition T-shirts, most likely made in someone's cellar in Brooklyn, have suddenly become the hipster's preferred mode of expression. Whether produced by college pals with studio art degrees or sold by highly organized Web companies like threadless.com - visitors to the site offer ideas and vote on designs, which are then put into microproduction - the limited edition T-shirt has become impossible to avoid.

The trend partly reflects the great democratic welter of the e-commerce ether, and it partly serves as a marker of hipness, defined by the savvy with which a consumer can navigate the Web labyrinth in search of the coolest obscurities.

[from The New York Times]

So, the more of a Web-surfing dork you can be correlates to how hip you are. You can believe it, because The New York Times has officially declared it to be true, which must mean the trend is already peaking, or is at least already blazingly obvious to everyone except Times’ editors (see: the year it took for the Times to notice the hot new SF series that has overtones of the current national security situation).

Anyway, this is my favorite T-shirt of the moment:

Reacting to the NYPD’s announcement Thursday afternoon that police would randomly -- but routinely -- search the bags of commuters, one concerned New Yorker quickly created a way for civil libertarians to make their views black-and-white.

In a few outraged moments, local immigrant rights activist Tony Lu designed t-shirts bearing the text "i do not consent to being searched."

[from The Village Voice]

Angry NYCers -- and geek hipsters looking to make a statement -- can buy the shirts here.

For Melinda Wilferd, nightlife in Los Angeles was a lot like high school. The 35-year-old ran with a crowd that often went to parties in downtown lofts, "where all the faces turn around and look at you, assessing whether or not you're going to fit in the hipster club." Where if you enjoy watching TV, you're held beneath contempt. And where "they talk about music like it's some revelation."

The pretension and callowness finally got to her, and one night "I told my friends I can't do this anymore." She began exploring wine bars and jazz clubs in search of more fulfilling nightlife — and to get away from hipsters. "Now I'm more interested in what pleases me," says the employee of a major cable network. "I just want my little place in this mad, mad world."

[from the Los Angeles Times]

So even the popular kids are turning geeky now.

Except even this new geekiness is hard:

Erica Timmerman... has felt pressure since adolescence to be considered cool. That pressure, along with her cancer, is now in remission. "And I'm not going to let anyone dictate how I'm supposed to look or act, and stop trying to be something I'm not," says Timmerman.

But if it’s "cool" now not to be hip, then how can you possibly escape the pressure, the mad, crazy pressure?!

My recommendation? Get a new friend:

If there’s a literary wing of Xer culture, its headquarters is surely McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, where pop nostalgia meets cultural criticism until they become practically the same thing... until they end up proving the point that the Xer character is intimately tied up parsing the sea of media we’re all almost drowning in.

Check out the piece "Anecdotal Leads for News Stories Reporting the End of the World". It’s a perfect example of the site’s Sahara-dry wit, and it wouldn’t be funny if the mainstream media wasn’t doing such a poor job of reporting the news -- eschewing fact-based reporting and in-depth analysis in favor of the easy and obvious human-interest story -- that bloggers have had to take over that role.

One sample from the piece:

Nine-year-old Joshua Harding didn't plan to miss classes Tuesday at West Monroe Elementary School. Nobody did.

But dismissed were his classes -- for good.

As the Net gets better and better at telling the personal stories, will so-called "real" journalists start doing their jobs again? Nah, I don’t think so, either.

Item: A blogger loses her job because her employer is stunned to discover her employee might be living a more exciting life than she is.

Item: Anonymous domain registrations, by a company that charges extra in exchange for anonymity, can be unlocked with a simple letter.

Be afraid -- be afraid. Because others are afraid, too, of the new public soapbox of the Net, and they can hurt you.

Surfing the Web sometimes feels to me like walking along the beach, just at the edge of the surf, and looking down all the time to pick up cool shells and interesting rocks and -- once in a rare while -- something awesome like an intact horseshoe-crab shell that’s been washed ashore. There are lots of cool and interesting and awesome things online, but I only get this feeling when it’s bits and pieces of cultural nostalgia that sloshes into my path...

Like the thousands and thousands and thousands of old 45s someone just sold on eBay. I never had thousands, but the 45s I had as kid were way more precious to me than all the CDs I have now -- I think it has to do with choice. I could slip one of those smooth vinyl platters out of its sleeve any time I wanted, pop in the little plastic adapter, slide it onto the turntable, and hear my favorite song right now, without having to listen to the radio for hours, keeping myself up all night waiting for the damn deejay to play one particular tune. (Which I did a lot.) Now it’s just way too easy to hear any one of thousands and thousands and thousands of songs whenever I want, with music everywhere: online, over cable, from my CD collection, whatever. And so of course, I end up hardly listening to anything at all anymore: not only can enormous choice be paralyzing, but it also, paradoxically, seems to reduce the desire to partake. If I can listen to anything whenever I want, it’ll still be there tomorrow, too.

Maybe that’s just me. Maybe the Xer obsession with nostalgia (some of us are even nostalgic for our now-defunct sites devoted to the Xer obsession with nostalgia) is like everyone’s love of nostalgia: we like being reminded of a simpler time, which everyone’s childhood was in comparison to his or her adulthood.

And that might be why I am moved almost to tears -- and definitely also to laughter -- by the images at Square America, a site devoted to sharing those old-fashioned square photographs that went out in the 1970s. My family’s photo albums are full of these gorgeous little four-sided moments in time, and all the pictures of chunky little baby me are chunky little squares of history. (That’s probably why this collection at Square America, featuring images of childhoods bygone, are particularly touching.) When I take snapshots of my family and friends now, with my digital camera, I snip and crop and print out and cut down to emphasis whoever the subject is, and I still find a square photo the most appealing. Something about a square photo just says love and warmth and home to me. My little niece in the square little pix I take of her will never feel the same way, because her family photo album will feature images of all sorts of wild shapes, cut down from ink-jet printouts... unless my brother just ends up keeping only a digital album, in which case perhaps a laughing kid unwrapping a Christmas present on a screensaver will say "love" to her.

---

I found this eBay auction and Square America via my surfing today at Metafilter, which is where I make lots of interesting discoveries. I trust the geeks there to scoop up the neatest beachfinds from the seashore of the Web. I like to think of them as virtual metal-detector nerds, and we all get to share in the treasures they collect.

"ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH." "Bloodsuckers." "The Man With the Screaming Brain." And, most indelible of all, "Mansquito."

But, Mr. Vitale added, Sci Fi is also "trying to reach a mainstream TV audience."

[from The New York Times]

I feel like everything that’s interesting about this piece from Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section goes unspoken... and that the writer didn’t even realize the implications of everything he was conveying.

The entire tenor of the article is one of bringing some secret, arcane ritual from deepest Africa or the remote mountains of the Himalayas to the great sophisticated masses of Manhattan, as if the possibility that someone might be both a reader of the Times and a watcher of Sci-Fi’s grade-B movies is so absurd that it needn’t bear thinking. And yet at the same time, the article itself states that the audience for these movies is mainstream... and also that Sci-Fi channel is seeking a mainstream audience as if it doesn’t already have it.

The underlying assumption is a great example of the cognitive dissonance associated with all things geeky: it’s everywhere and it’s immensely popular, but it’s weird and niche and not something that "normal" people are into.

Following up on my post yesterday about the London bombings, The New York Times is all over this today with an article about blogs and Flickr contributing to a new paradigm in reporting:

Online photo-sharing sites and Web blogs began chronicling the attacks soon after they occurred, posting material often gathered before professional news organizations arrived on the scenes.

"A lot of what's being done by the citizen-journalist will be most useful as people start pulling together the best images and stories," he said. "There was a cliche that journalists write the first draft of history. Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."

[from The New York Times]

Of course, unspoken in all this is that it’s geeks who are changing the face of news because we’re the ones carrying around digital cameras and camera phones as a regular thing and playing with them all the time, and then we’re the ones to whom it actually occurs to share the resulting images with the whole Web. I mean, I guess everyone has that instinct to take a picture of something weird or different or interesting ("What is it?" "I dunno!" "Quick, take my picture in front of it!"), but geeks are the people with the technological inclination to use a camera all the time, not just when we’re on vacation, to document everything... and once in a while we happen to capture something really amazing. (Some artists might carry cameras all the time, but for other reasons.) You’re just never gonna see an image like this:

coming from a reporter who arrives after shit has already gone down.

[image from mobloguk]

It’s like we’re all Ernie Pyle now, in the line of fire and conveying the experience to everyone else.

(Oo, and by the way: Ernie Pyle was an Xer of his time...)

A Japanese publisher will hold a national qualifying exam for self-confessed "nerds" on their knowledge of comics, video games and other obsessive hobbies in a bid to smash prejudice and nurture a so-called "geek elite".

[from IOL]

Okay, let me make sure I understand this. Someone thought a good way to "smash prejudice" would be to confirm all the negative attributes the oppressed are perceived to evince? Someone thought a good way to improve the image of Japanese otaku -- reclusive young men who obsess on things like manga to the point of psychosis -- would be to indulge their manic obsessiveness?

Okay then.

Some folks are tired of George Lucas’s saga. I’m not one of them... but I might have to buy one of these T-shirts anyway.

Some generations express themselves through poetry; others, through song. Xers use T-shirts.

(Yeah, I’m a big ol’ Firefly dork, and I’m seriously geeked for Joss Whedon’s Serenity. But that’s a very long and very involved blog entry for another day.)

If this is true:

The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be US$2,266 per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia. It was the 77th richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.

[from Flat Rock]

Then this was inevitable:

The macros for World of WarCraft, for example, control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with gold and items, the "farmer" who's monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their thing again. Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.

[from 1up.com]

The entrepreneurial bent of Xers does have its unpleasant side.

Generation X, labeled in the 1980s as a group of cynical, apathetic slackers, is all grown up: The oldest members are hitting the big Four-Oh this year.

Things haven't changed much and probably won't, even though they're reaching a midlife milestone, say generational experts.

[from the Las Vegas Review Journal]

I think it’s likely that the oldest Xers hit 40 a few years ago, and I take umbrage with the suggestion that there’s something bad about focusing more on leisure time and personal fulfillment than in kowtowing to a corporate overlord, but apart from that, this article ends up offering a pretty good definition of exactly who Generation Xers are -- and it’s a fairly positive depiction, too:

Those seemingly negative characteristics actually define Generation X, born between 1965 and 1981, and are nothing more than the mark of an individualistic, self-reliant generation, said Chuck Underwood, president and founder of The Generational Imperative, a Cincinnati-based research and consulting company. Not surprisingly, it was the events of their formative years -- the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s -- that shaped who they are today.

"Xers tend to separate their work from personal relationships and they are entrepreneurial. Those are the kind of qualities that the unpredictable workforce will embrace in the coming future," Underwood said. "Xers have plenty of toughness."

Lots of good stuff -- click over to read the whole article.

...when one of the most prominent lefty bloggers online invokes The Muppet Show when bitching about the state of mainstream political commentary.

(BTW, the first season of The Muppet Show hits DVD next month. I'm gonna have quite a bit to say about that soon...)