Why Stories
I wrote this around the New Year for Gizmodo, but for some reason (it’s super fruity?) it got lost in the shuffle, so here it is.
Fire was not the first technology. It was the alphabet. By allowing us to tell a story, the transmission of knowledge blossomed, from myth to story to joke. And despite what some may think, that’s what our gadgets do today.
My brain has been trying to close the chapter on this decade, because that’s what it is built to do. Is what we do important? Does helping to create a site like Gizmodo move our culture forward? Or are we simply acting as agents to uncheck consumption?
On the last point, I must concede. We’re probably harming as much as we’re helping, albeit no worse than any catalog or social gathering where one can show off a new toy or talk shop about the next.
But I’ve noticed for a long time a reticence by my peers—by which I mean the average yapping fuckhole on the internet, myself included—to adopt a position of post-innovation hipsterism. To express an attitude of so-over-it before things have barely begun.
Take Twitter. (Please!) Is it a distraction? It can be. Better to acknowledge it as protocol, the latest vector through which we communicate, regardless of what story we choose to actually tell.
It’s the story that matters. And our technology, our internet—or our gadgets by which we interface that internet—are tools for telling stories. Big stories. Little stories. And with the blossoming of sensors and passive collection of our personal data, stories that lie in wait, that won’t even be told until someone else recognizes they are there to tell.
Forgive me some dreaming. What will our gadgets look like in the next decade? It is certain they will be less and less visible. The smartphone lump will get more powerful and more aware of its surroundings, communicating data passively at all points. If I want to know the air quality around you and whether or not you’re still smoking, I’ll just ask your phone.
Augmented reality will work, and while I’m not convinced that mirrorshades will end up being the best solution, the technology to embed graphical overlays onto our glasses and perhaps even our contacts will advance at least to a point where we can try it on for size. If the price is right, every pane of glass or mirror will be double as a display.
The keyboard will probably become a specialized tool, much as we’re seeing the same happen to the mouse today. Cameras will eye us, microphones will listen to us, and together they’ll do their best to guess our meaning.
But more surely than anything, I expect our interface to the internet—through the internet—to our friends, family, and species will continue to flourish. Gadgets will provide increasingly granular elements of data, while engineers will dream up new ways to weave those bits into narratives that let us understand ourselves in new ways; or failing that, at least experience the banality of our fellow man with increased fidelity.
Stories are what matter. Stories are what make us human, what gives our outsized brain a reason to exist, even if our capacity to tell them, listen to them, and understand our existence through them is an accidental byproduct of an efficiency first developed to better hunt, feed, and reproduce.
Which is why, even though it may be lackadaisical or unprofessional to some for a simple gadget blog to stray beyond the bounds of firmware updates and product releases, I believe technology journalism remains one of the vibrant places to explore the human condition.
Any tool user can succumb to the navel-song of shop talk, if only to dream for a moment about the stories they might hear or tell if only their rock had a sharper edge or their pen a carbon-fiber quill. But to ignore the story of our storytelling—the exciting boundary where new technology lets new stories be uncovered and old stories told in a new way—is doing a disservice to everyone.
Because why are we here at all if not to tell our stories; and to braid ours with every new fiber we can invent?
“Delivering high impact public relations”
Marketing continues to get ever more strange. An email I just received in what appears to be an email blast from a public relations company:
from Emily Held <[redacted]@pancomm.com>
to Tim Munroe <[redacted]@pancomm.com>
date Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 11:22 AM
mailed-by pancomm.comHey Tim-
Heads up, your office is smelling like fish…I had to shut your door.
Emily T. Held
PAN Communications, Inc.
[redacted]@pancomm.com
Delivering high-impact public relations
Free to be you and me
From Spiegel, a newspaper, and its interview with Wired editor-in-chief and author of the new book Free* Chris Anderson, in which he talks some crazy:
Anderson: Sorry, I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.
Your apology is not accepted! Also, where do you live that your way is regularly impeded by horseless carriages? Fucking San Francisco hipsters. I bet those are fixed-gear carriages, too.
Anderson: There are no other words. We’re in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don’t have meaning.
Okay, Timothy Leary! Is this “strange era” called “book promotion” or “consulting”? I dropped out of Harvard by going to community college.
If Jeff Jarvis and Terrence McKenna had a baby we would still have a 20th-century word for “I want to punch that baby in the beard.” (In fairness, it’s probably German.)
I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don’t go to mainstream media directly to read it.
Which is why I’ll be republishing the entire content stream of Wired.com here on my own blog.
It’s going to take us a decade or two to figure out what it is we’re doing.
“But in the meantime, buy my book!”
We make millions of dollars in revenues, and we decide whether we want to be profitable or not.
Spoiler: They decide to be profitable.
We’ve tried paying some of our bloggers and they thought it was insulting.
Really, it’s an honor just to be aggregated.
In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job.
Chris, I’m pretty sure Conde will let you go on vacation if you just ask. Maybe you could tell them you’re writing a book?
* I’ll make real money if you buy it on Amazon: Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available for $27 in hardcover; $10 on Kindle) but not if you pay $0 to read it on Scribd.
Image: Carito Orellana
Opinion: The only difference between old and new media is efficiency
David Simon’s on a tear again about the news. Newspapers, specifically—he wants the Times and the Post to put up a pay wall.
It might be a good idea. I mean, I doubt it, but even though I’m counting my pennies these days I would probably throw five bucks into the pot to pay for the Times. They do good work, and deserve to be paid for it.
But like most arguments about why old media organizations are worth saving, Simon implies that if the Times and Post were to collapse that online-only outlets wouldn’t be able to pick up the slack—no beating feet to proverbial city council meetings—calling online outlets a “vague suggestion of a better [product].”
Journalism is a craft, and a rather elemental one at that. You cultivate contacts. You pick up the phone. You search records. It’s masonry, not sculpture. Go gather up another trowel of information and slap it on the pile; scrape off the bits that seem to ooze needlessly and move on to the next column. Incidentally art is made.
Sure, there are tricks and shortcuts and subtleties that take years to learn. (See the essential The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft to discover how varied and even opposed those methods may be among different reporters.) But our archives are filled with decades of perfectly serviceable, worthwhile journalism created by average newspapermen following the hand-me-down tenets of the craft.
The difference between old media and new, to me, is not whether citizens can practice journalism as well as full-time employees, but whether they have the time to do so. Most people have day jobs; Until every town gets a wealthy playboy Bat-blogger, there’s still a role for full-time journalists.
Newspapers had in the recent past been pretty profitable businesses, allowing the largest to support reporting staff of thousands. The Times currently has around 1,300 newsroom staff. (A staff that won five Pulitzer Prizes in 2009.) When Simon talks about the importance of the Times, those 1,300 people are who he’s talking about. No doubt they matter.
But the Times isn’t just a newspaper, it’s a sprawling business, owner of several papers, a radio station, and an investor in web companies like Federated Media and Automattic (the people who make the blogging platform WordPress). And that business is as a whole bleeding millions of dollars a year.
Thirteen hundred employees really isn’t all that many people when you think about it. And if the Times can’t figure out how to run their entire business profitably and ends up having to lay off its content creators—the core group of people who the rest of the world perceives as the New York Times—then it’s not difficult to imagine another company of 1,300 reporters rising up to take its place. The same goes for the Associated Press—their work may be essential to the health of a society, but that work can be done by other, more efficiently operated companies.
I suspect the media landscape five years hence won’t look as drastically different as the faltering media companies today say it will. There will be big media companies; there will be small media companies; there will be citizen journalists. We’re going through a familiar market shake-up. When the dust settles, the leanest businesses will still be standing, selling gossip, enthusiast and niche coverage, and traditional, essential reportage in whichever manner is best suited for their audience and the advertisers who want to get to them.
There is no such thing as old media—only old business models.
Image: Jer Thorp, who is doing some lovely visualization work with NYTIMES data and Processing.