Writing in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Mitchell Stephens argues that newspaper stories must start providing insight as well as information, if they're to keep a competitive edge next to Internet sources, cable, and radio. Just as monthly and bimonthly magazines make up for their slow response with increased analysis of current events, daily newspapers will have to make up for what is beginning to look like a slow response with increased analysis.
In effect, this means that the writer must put more of himself in the story, and we shouldn't worry so much about objectivity.
Besides the pressure from Internet sources, there are reasons newspapers might head this way that Stephens doesn't mention. Objectivity was important to newspapers because it allowed their stories to appeal to more people. A paper that published opinionated stories quickly alienated a good portion of its readership. But as our culture becomes increasingly polarized, it becomes increasingly difficult to find neutral middle ground. I don't think there are presently any newspapers in America that aren't generally considered to be either liberal or conservative. This may always have been the case, but it wasn't always the case that liberals and conservatives saw papers on the opposing side as radical and worthy of destruction (as Ann Coulter apparently did when she said: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building").
It might make more sense, then, for papers to solidify the loyalty of the readers in their perceived ideological bases.
The downside of this is obvious. However unrealistic it might seem to think that there is an objective truth, the semblance of an objective truth has been a stronghold of cohesion in our culture. When we all read the same newspapers, our varying reactions to the same story are personal; but when conservatives read one paper and liberals read another, our varying reactions to the same story are tribal.
But who, faced with a newspaper full of stale facts that were already broadcast on the radio and a newspaper full of thoughtful analysis, would not pick the latter?
Friday, February 16
Monday, February 5
Crowdsourced
My interest in public space versus private space has surfaced in this blog a few times, usually in connection with the ways a networked life changes how we share physical space. But networked life also changes how we share intellectual space.
Penguin has begun a new experiment in what it calls crowdsourcing. It is, in a nutshell, a wiki novel. You can read what's been written so far here. And, this being a wiki, you can also edit it or add to it.
The challenges in collective writing are analogous to the challenges in any public venture. On the site's About page, Jeremy Ettinghausen says:
The project is still less than a week old, but already the novel has taken on the character of a public space. In a private space we seek a singular, coherent expression of our identity; in a public space, however, we allow or even encourage an accretion of numberless identities, styles, and philosophies. In a typical novel, an author limits himself to three or four major characters - or perhaps as many as a dozen. At present, Penguin's crowdsourced novel has 41 major characters. Among them are Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open-source Linux operating system, and Bill Gates. Its chapter titles are multilingual ("Chapter 4 大香蕉 [The Big Banana]") and mildly subversive ("Chapter 8 1/2").
Just as an unguarded subway car suggests graffiti to a certain kind of mind, to contributing writers this shared intellectual space can only suggest gleeful subversion of its own language, plot, and setting. It shouldn't be surprising then that there are exhausting explosions of incongruous words and images in the novel, and that the structure of the novel is driven by formal experimentation. The only traditional literary device that is likely to survive in the novel is irony.
Therefore, it seems to me that only one writing style can result from this collaborative form. The writing style of David Foster Wallace.
Penguin has begun a new experiment in what it calls crowdsourcing. It is, in a nutshell, a wiki novel. You can read what's been written so far here. And, this being a wiki, you can also edit it or add to it.
The challenges in collective writing are analogous to the challenges in any public venture. On the site's About page, Jeremy Ettinghausen says:
Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door?
The project is still less than a week old, but already the novel has taken on the character of a public space. In a private space we seek a singular, coherent expression of our identity; in a public space, however, we allow or even encourage an accretion of numberless identities, styles, and philosophies. In a typical novel, an author limits himself to three or four major characters - or perhaps as many as a dozen. At present, Penguin's crowdsourced novel has 41 major characters. Among them are Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open-source Linux operating system, and Bill Gates. Its chapter titles are multilingual ("Chapter 4 大香蕉 [The Big Banana]") and mildly subversive ("Chapter 8 1/2").
Just as an unguarded subway car suggests graffiti to a certain kind of mind, to contributing writers this shared intellectual space can only suggest gleeful subversion of its own language, plot, and setting. It shouldn't be surprising then that there are exhausting explosions of incongruous words and images in the novel, and that the structure of the novel is driven by formal experimentation. The only traditional literary device that is likely to survive in the novel is irony.
Therefore, it seems to me that only one writing style can result from this collaborative form. The writing style of David Foster Wallace.
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