About blogging (yet again)

Back in the glory days, the story was that blogging was going to destroy print media, provided the underpants gnomes could work out a way to monetise it. Imagine my surprise, when ambling through the WH Smith at Euston station...

Cats and guns and MK Dons

Meanwhile, it’s still August, and reality is in retreat. We learn that Hello Kitty is not a cat (she’s actually a 40-something woman who lives in the Home Counties); China tries to calm down its fractious minorities with a cartoon concubine; the strange tale of the Japanese oddball who joined ISIS; the newsroom at The Times is alive with the sound of typewriters; and, hot on the heels of a 9-year-old girl killing her shooting instructor with an uzi, an audio technician on the TV show Cops is killed by, uh, cops. And Manchester United getting beaten by a team that, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t really exist. And Kate Bush. Oh, and this:

PS: And this, by Jopsy, via Valerie:

PPS: The New Yorker responds to the Kitty bombshell.

Sunday, January 13, 2013: The day journalism died, pretty much

Julie Burchill wrote something in The Observer yesterday. (Update: As it’s now been removed by the Observer this link now goes to Toby Young’s Telegraph blog, as he’s reposted the whole thing.) You may have heard about it; you certainly would have done if you were within 500 yards of Twitter, which erupted like a lanced bubo of goopy virtual outrage. The whole thing was a classic case of a banal non-event escalating into something bigger, rather like an urban riot beginning with a spilled pint. Apparently, Burchill’s friend and fellow scribe Suzanne Moore had said something mildly disobliging about a few transsexuals; rather more transsexuals overreacted a bit in Ms Moore’s direction; Moore left Twitter over the treatment she was getting; Burchill then really gave the transsexuals something by which they could be offended, when she – oh, you can read it if you really want. It’s not nice.

The people at The Observer must have known something was liable to kick off, because they turned the comment function off as the article sat there in the early hours of Sunday morning. But of course, rather than simply fume in impotence, people took to the Moore-free space of Twitter, haranguing Burchill, Moore (who, I’m guessing, hadn’t actually had anything to do with Burchill’s piece) and, amusingly, The Guardian. (Because many of the two papers’ online functions are integrated, the link to Burchill’s piece made it look as if it was from The Guardian; the editor of the daily paper seemed to spend much of his Sunday tweeting variants on “nuffink to do wiv me, guv”.) Of course, the argument did get made that all the waving of Twitchforks was simply encouraging more curious traffic to the offending article, which is what Burchill wanted in the first place but by that stage common sense seemed to have sneaked off to the pub. I was particularly aggrieved because the online frenzy interrupted my Twitter-enhanced listen to the omnibus edition of The Archers and I was unable to get Ruth’s mention of a #duffbatchofsemen trending, even though it seemed rather germane to the whole issue of supposedly real and unreal sexual identities.

Of course, Burchill was not the only person to write something ghastly yesterday. The reliably vile Liz Jones was characteristically spiteful about Clare Balding in the Mail, an act that would usually have provoked mob of its own, but rather got lost amidst the anti-Burchill screaming. (Incidentally, how does someone who looks like a Goth version of Gillian McKeith get the right to criticise someone else’s appearance?) Then there was the journalist Patrick Strudwick, who took the popular chanteuse Azealia Banks to task for the use of a nasty word and was then assailed by her dim fans who, for the most part, just proved his point.

Amidst the furore, Matt was changing the bulb in Peggy’s porch light, unaware that Lillian (his partner and Peggy’s daughter) was at that moment enjoying carnal rudeness with Paul (Matt’s brother). But did anybody care by this point? (Note to the uninitiated: he’s still on about The Archers, OK?)

I’m not sure what effect this is going to have on relations between feminists and the trans community, and I don’t think I’m best placed to comment on such matters anyway. I do think, however, it represents something of a tipping point in the way journalism works. Burchill has always hungered for attention, and she genuinely doesn’t care whether it comes in the form of adulation or loathing. And now the fragile eco-system of the media has evolved to meet her. Burchill gets eyeballs and that’s the only kind of currency the likes of The Observer can work on. When it gets to the stage when their rivals at the Telegraph and Independent are commenting on the brouhaha and presumably pushing online readers away from their own offerings, if only for a few minutes, the cash-strapped Obs people must be clapping their hands, even if they’ve lost a few alternatively gendered readers along the way. After years of sneering at the shoddy, superficial sensationalism of the blogosphere, the broadsheets have finally cracked. This is how it’s going to work from now on; as Oscar said (I wonder where his sympathies would have rested in this spat), the worst thing is not being talked about.

But the best comment comes almost by accident. I’m assuming that Charlie Brooker filed his latest Guardian piece some time before he’d have had a chance to see Burchill’s screed, but it neatly skewers those who seek to offend and those who rise to the bait, describing the egregious scourge of environmentalist James Delingpole as “laughing like a naughty boy who has just blown off through the headmaster’s letterbox”. Well, just think of Burchill and Jones and their ilk all dropping their drawers and jostling to get their tired sphincters in the optimum position so as to deliver a cabbagey trump or two to the intellectual life of Britain. And if that isn’t a hideous enough image to make you ignore their inane provocations, I don’t know what is.

Meanwhile, back in Ambridge, Kenton’s trying to cadge some milk churns...

PS: Padraig Reidy at Index on Censorship on the fallout from the Burchill affair.

PPS: The Observer has elected to “withdraw from publication the Julie Burchill comment piece ‘Transsexuals should cut it out’”. Whether this amounts to self-censorship or a retrospective attack of good taste, I’m not sure. What do you think? 

Hooray! It’s the return of old-style blogging!

This blog has been going nearly seven – count them – not that it’s all that much effort to count them – unless you’re really bad at counting – although, thinking about it, that “nearly” does make it a bit trickier, so maybe the last one’s a sort of “seve” rather than a “seven” – years. And this is my 1,251st post, which means... well, it certainly means, although whether it means anything in particular, I’m less sure. Maybe that I missed some sort of milestone in the last post? Dunno. Anyway, yes, right, and in that time, well, woo, hasn’t everything changed? Well, not really, give or take a few iPhone models. But this blog has changed, and so has blogging as a whole.

I mean, back in those oldenny timey days I had no shame in doing compendium posts on any number of only tangentially related subjects, usually ending with an arbitrarily chosen picture or YouTube clip; and everyone would weigh in with their contributions and contradictions and corrections and it was, as the sainted Patroclus called it, one big conversation; but then something happened somewhere along the line; and I’m still blogging, but Cultural Snow seems to have turned into a continuum of discrete articles, each about a subject. And plenty of people are reading what I’m writing (I don’t know if it’s more or less than it was in the old days, because I’ve only had the magic thingy wotsit that tells me how many people are reading for the past three years) but far fewer are commenting.

So, if I were blogging now under proper old-style blogging conditions (only one substitute allowed, two points for a win, highlights later on Match of the Day), I’d probably have some choice words for Booker judge and all-round silly sausage Peter Stothard, who said of the rise of literary bloggers:

Eventually that will be to the detriment of literature. It will be bad for readers; as much as one would like to think that many bloggers’ opinions are as good as others. It just ain’t so. People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off. There are some important issues here.

...to which I’d point out that bloggers are simply people with opinions, just like professional literary critics and that while there are doubtless some literary bloggers who are a bit crap, anyone who tries to argue that every paid literary critic on a highbrow newspaper or magazine knows what s/he’s talking about is either arrogant or stupid or probably both. And then I’d point out that criticism is no longer (never was, to be honest) about a select few handing down verdicts from above; it’s about argument and dialectic and kite-flying, and about how very often a statement can be wrong, but can still have value because of the intellectual fireworks it provokes in others; and I’d probably remind my readers that this is what Stothard is saying is pretty much what Andrew Keen said, and Keen was talking bollocks as well. But it doesn’t matter because between them they’ve prompted me to say something far more sensible, which is how this whole thing works, so thanks guys, you bloody imbeciles. And this would have been pretty much par for the course, because looking back, we didn’t half blog a lot about the nature and purpose and meaning of blogging.

And that line of argument would sort of trail off a bit, and I’d start talking about how I don’t much like the sound of Steven Poole’s new book, which appears to argue that because he’s not that interested in food, we shouldn’t be either. And then I’d remember that I was quite rude about his previous book as well, and then felt very guilty because he was subsequently very generous about my Radiohead book, but in fact I didn’t feel guilty, it was just an excuse to squeeze in a mention of my Radiohead book and maybe some of the others.

But then I might have changed tack completely and reflected on the most recent episode of Dr Who, with its scary cherubs and time paradoxes and, ooh just a little splash of Dennis Potter, maybe. And then I’d ponder the metafictional nature of Melody’s pulp novel, with its plot lines that the characters are doomed to follow, which rather obscures the fact that the characters are really doomed to follow the diktats of Steven Moffat, who wrote the script. And I’d ask whether the Doctor cheated by reading the chapter headings, whether they exist in advance of the action or in parallel to it. 

And I’d make a clumsy effort to pull together various elements of the above (blogging and self-aggrandizement and postmodernism, basically) and suggest once again that you really ought to be reading my Infinite Jest blog, in which I am currently exercised by David Foster Wallace’s cavalier attitude to chapters and chapter headings. Oh, and snot. There’s lots of snot going around.

And then I’d say, yay! That Rockmother’s blogging again!

And finally I’d probably put in a picture of Helen Mirren and/or Charlotte Rampling not wearing very much, but still tasteful, like. OK, Helen it is:

But of course I won’t do any of that, because we don’t do that old-style blogging any more, do we?

Professional, foul

I've spent so much time and energy over the last year or so sneering at Andrew Keen and his anti-Web 2.0 spiel The Cult of the Amateur that it seems a bit superfluous actually to read the bloody thing, which I did last week. It would be charitable, if a little embarrassing, to report that I'd got the poor man completely wrong, and that his apocalyptic vision of the damage that blogs, social networks and Wikipedia are inflicting upon contemporary culture is bang on the money.

Well, it's not, but hundreds of others have already taken him to task over that, and I'm not going to chuck another bundle of twigs on the pyre just to make a point. That said, here's a very quick flavour of his argument: he expresses horror about a New York Times report that "50 percent of all bloggers blog for the sole purpose of reporting and sharing experiences about their personal lives."

Well, as that consummate professional, the blessed Gene Hunt would put it, "You make that sound like a bad thing." Keen joins all the other defiantly analogue numpties (Janet Street-Porter, Mary Dejevsky, etc) in making the reductive and simplistic assumption that because bloggers don't necessarily write brilliantly incisive news stories, they're bad at what they do; which is about as sensible as asserting that because Cristiano Ronaldo doesn't get many wickets, he's a rubbish cyclist. I thought we dealt with all this well over two years ago? Ah. I see we did.

So Keen's grasp of blogging and other manifestations of Web 2.0 is on a par with all those broadsheet journos who suddenly tried to get their heads round Twitter when Stephen Fry got on board. Little or no surprise there. But what astonished me about his book is the number of other things that he appears not to understand.

Let's take economics. Now, I can't claim to be the heir to Keynes or Friedman, or even Robert Peston, but I think even I can see the flaw in Keen's objections to advertisers running user-generated clips at the 2007 SuperBowl:

According to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the average professionally produced thirty-second spot costs $381,000. Yet Frito-Lay paid a mere $10,000 to each of the five finalists on the table. That's $331,000 that wasn't paid to professional filmmakers, scriptwriters, actors and marketing companies — $331,000 sucked out of the economy.

"Sucked out of the economy"? Since when has a cost saving been money sucked out of the economy? It's not as if Mr Frito and Mr Lay went off to some remote Scottish island, KLF-style, and burned that $331,000. So it didn't go to filmmakers or scriptwriters: but Frito-Lay doesn't exist to keep filmmakers and scriptwriters in business. They could have spent it on salaries or shareholder dividends, they could have knocked a couple of cents off some of their products, or redecorated their offices or given it to charity; all of which would have seen that money re-enter the economy.

Later, Keen demonstrates further that sums aren't his strong point when he multiplies 99 cents (the cost of an iTunes download) by 20 billion (allegedly the number of songs 'stolen' by downloaders in a year) and makes $19.99 billion. Maybe he can use that stray 190 million to pay off all those scriptwriters who are going to have to sell their grannies because the likes of Frito-Lay have sucked all the money out of the economy, like big, cheese-flavoured Hoovers.

But this is just a sideshow to Keen's most egregious flaw. It's not just that he doesn't understand Web 2.0, the thing he's attacking; he doesn't even seem to understand old media, the thing he purports to want to save. The history of print and broadcast journalism is strewn with examples of corruption, hyperbole, political spin and honest-to-goodness mistakes. Yet Keen lays into the online video Loose Change (which claimed that the 9/11 were carried out by the US government) and the Moonie-owned webzine Insight — originally a hard-copy magazine — with its smears against Hillary Clinton, as if wacky conspiracy theories and politically-motivated muckraking were invented at about the same time as wireless internet.

Moreover, he seems to believe that one of the main things that distinguishes traditional media from self-defined citizen journalists is paper qualifications. "After all," he sneers, attacking the credentials of bloggers such as Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Glenn Reynolds, "who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site?"

Well, I've written for major (non-Moonie-owned) print publications in Britain and Asia, which I suppose makes me a journalist of sorts. And I've never set foot in a journalism class. The closest I've come to proper training was in 1993, when I sat in a pokey little office near Carnaby Street while a former disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh showed me how to sub-edit. "Above all, make sure it fits on the page," he said, and I think he was probably right.

In Keenland, it's not just journalists who need degrees and diplomas, though. He attacks Wikipedia by comparing it unfavourably with the Oxford English Dictionary, a product that apparently exemplifies the benefits of a properly trained and accredited editorial team. He neglects to mention, however, that two of the men most responsible for the success of the original OED, James Murray and Henry Bradley, were, by his own definition, mere amateurs, not even having attended university (a distinction they share with George Bernard Shaw, lauded by Keen as an example of the 'qualified' contributors that Britannica has and Wikipedia lacks). Incidentally, I got the information about Murray and Bradley, not from Wikipedia, but from a rather good book called The Meaning of Everything, written by Simon Winchester, who has worked with great success as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian and The Sunday Times. He read geology at Oxford, and I rather suspect he doesn't hold many journalism qualifications.

It would appear that Keen's (wilful?) lack of understanding even extends to the title of his own book. If we take the risk of conflating blogging and journalism under a general heading of people-who-write-for-public-consumption, what defines amateurs isn't lack of ability; it's nothing more than the fact that they don't get paid for doing what they do. Which may imply a lack of seriousness, but also frees them from a hell of a lot of other pressures, such as the demands of proprietors or advertisers. When he has a go at the "amateur", what he's really getting at, in his dim and disgruntled manner, is the "amateurish", a label that can be applied to a depressingly large chunk of professionally written product. Including, as I now know, Keen's own silly, ill-considered book.

PS: On the subject of Wikipedia's perceived shortcomings, Shane Richmond discusses the mysterious case of the phantom entry.

Hacks against the wall

In which I take a look at mainstream news journalism and social networking sites at one and the same time and shake my fist at them in an exceptionally tetchy manner.

Dick's flicks

Film critic Richard Schickel holds forth in the LA Times on the amateurs encroaching on his patch:

"Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities."

Which is true-ish. There's a difference between an opinion poll that deems Star Wars to be the best film ever made, and one that gives the gong to Citizen Kane or Rashomon. It's not just snobbery; it's that a higher proportion of people who voted for Kane have also seen Star Wars, than vice versa.

Where Schickel falls down, and very heavily, is in his arrogant assumption that the paid critics are more likely to have done the intellectual legwork than the bloggers. Let me put this bluntly, in language that even Schickel can understand: many people who are paid to offer their opinions in newspapers and magazines are fatuous, ill-informed arseholes. Many people who offer their opinions for free, in blogs, are knowledgeable, articulate and perceptive critics.

Ah, but it's not the bloggers himself, he suggests, perhaps suddenly aware that an increasing number of his elite friends are also edging into this strange discipline. It's the medium:

"The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement."

The notion that Mr Schickel's finely-honed aperçus are more 'permanent' than those of a blogger because they end up dead-tree media rather than on the Web is simply too idiotic to contemplate. Being a gentleman from the former colonies, he may not be aware of the phrase 'tomorrow's chip wrapper', but I think he might be able to get the gist of it. In any case, the only reason I came across his senile, poncy witterings is that I found a link to them on another website.

But does the fact that I don't have a subscription to the LA Times mean that I'm not one of his intimate circle of chums who can distinguish between 'disciplined taste' and mere opinion?

Pseuds' corner

The last word about blogging vs old media, for the moment at least, I promise. I was looking for something Adorno said about ukeleles, for some completely different purpose, when I came upon this:

"Pseudo-activity is misguided spontaneity. Misguided, but not accidentally so; because people do have a dim suspicion of how hard it would be to throw off the yoke that weighs upon them. They prefer to be distracted by spurious and illusory activities, by institutionalized vicarious satisfactions, than to face up to the awareness of how little access they have to the possibility of change today. Pseudo-activities are fictions and parodies of the same productivity which society on the one hand incessantly calls for, but on the other holds in check and, as far as the individual is concerned, does not really desire at all."

Now old Theo was talking about DIY, of all things. But I think there's an interesting point to be made about blogging as well. Of course, plumbers and carpenters and electricians and other skilled tradesmen felt threatened by the post-war DIY boom (although they probably recouped any potential losses with the exorbitant rates they could charge for emergency repairs whenever some klutz stuck a rivet through the gas pipe). But I think the reaction of many journalists to blogging is slightly different. They may sneer at it, as a pseudo-activity, as a parody of what they are paid to do. But if they did a bit of soul-searching, and looked at the recycled press releases and witless lifestyle guff with which so many of them lag the cavities of the media (and I must clarify that I'm not casting aspersions on all hacks here), they suddenly realise that what they do is just as much a pseudo-activity as what I'm doing here. Exactly what value do the 3am Girls offer that, say, Billy doesn't?

At least when you pay someone to come round to repair the gas pipe, you get your cooker working again.

Pornographers-in-chief

Doing one of my periodic clearouts of the mountain of dead tree that I still accumulate, I found this, in the FT magazine from last February. It's by Trevor Butterworth, who, in the course of an extended poo-pooing of blogging,* argues:

"In contrast to the British and European media, which had their origins in the Enlightenment and the belief that journalism was a forum for debate and argument - even philosophy, according to David Hume - the American press is a 19th century creation animated by the pursuit of fact. Blogging - if you will forgive the cartoon philosophising - brought the European Enlightenment to the US. Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise. Which is great. But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet."

Maybe this explains the differing reactions of old media practitioners on each side of the pond. Many American hacks hate blogging, because it does something different, and thus confuses them. Many British hacks (see examples passim) are equally scornful, because it does the same thing as they do, often better (?) and thus threatens them.

* It won't work because it won't make money, he says - cf Patroclus's PR-related comment appended to the previous post.

Paper tigers

Bob Swipe is characteristically droll and perceptive on the subject of The Girl With A One-Track Mind and her recent difficulties; and also on the self-evident superiority of Spinsterella's blog to The Girl's. I don't want to stay in a solipsistic quagmire, musing about the Nature And Future Of Blogging, and the whole Old/New Media thang; and I promise this is going to be the absolutely final reference to all those mad women at The Independent. (No links. Just Google "Mary Dejevsky gynaecology" and stand back.)

Small Boo was in Hong Kong over the weekend, and came back with a couple of the UK Sunday broadsheets. Now, I scan the UK press quite intensively via the WWW; but there is still something different about reading a paper. Because you're not choosing to summon up discrete articles, you get an overall view of the whole product; as the advertising slogan for the News of the World used to declaim, "All human life is there".

Essentially, most articles in a modern newspaper fall into one of three categories: news; comment/analysis; and lifestyle. Now, news is one area where old media has an edge over blogs, and will do for some time. It's a question of resources and access: we don't have a Murdoch expense account; we don't have accreditation; we won't get embedded with the Marines. Yes, individuals can get an invite to the party with their cellphone footage of the 7/7 attacks; but, despite the efforts of Matt Drudge and his ilk, the networks and the big corporations still run the show here.

Comment/analysis (which, I suppose, is the sort of ground on which I've pitched my tent) is a greyer area. In theory, all you need is a basic level of subject knowledge, and smattering of critical intelligence. In practice, the big guns have the advantage, because they have access to raw material ahead of us. I can't come up with any serious analysis of the Booker longlist, because I can't afford that many hardbacks, and some of them haven't even been published yet. However, as producers start to realise that word-of-blog is a decent selling tool, they're starting to send pre-release review copies of books, CDs, etc to certain bloggers; doubtless this practice will continue, and increase. But I'm not the literary editor of the New York Times and I know it.

But when it comes to lifestyle, I think something interesting is going on. Newspapers are full to gag-reflex point with columns in which middle-class journalists tell us about how amusing their children are. In small doses, this can be interpreted as a quasi-sociological snapshot of modern life. In practice, it gives an entirely warped view of what's going on, because all these views are expressed by journalists, who by definition are not normal. (This is not a dig at hacks; it would be ridiculous if all these columns were written by architects, or butchers, or redheads, none of whom, collectively, are 'normal' either.)

People have joked about how banal these Polly Filler columns are; bloggers have proved this is one area where they have the edge, because bloggers are amateurs, and come from a much wider range of backgrounds and lifestyles. But what's freaked out some journalists is that rather too many of these lifestyle bloggers - stand up Spinster again, but there are plenty more of you out there - are equally good, if not better, as writers. So Old Media has a choice. It can co-opt them: whether to turn them into 'real' journalists/authors, thus compromising their objectivity; or to add blogs to their own outlets. Or it can follow the lead of The Independent and make feeble squawking noises from the sidelines.

It's fairly clear which course is in the best interests of Old Media. And as someone who was working in various manifestations of that media for 15 years before I started blogging, I've got no scruples if someone offers me an inducement to extend in a cross-platform direction. But I think The Girl's experiences indicate that it's not always going to be a smooth transition. In other words, Spinster - if someone comes waving a cheque, you're worth it, but don't jump in head-first.

Unless you fancy him, of course.

Love me, love my blog

Following on from what I posted a few weeks ago, about bloggers seeking validation in the form of analogue success, here's a piece in Newsday that seems to back me up, although the sample seems to be exclusively made up of Americans.

"They [bloggers] often revel in their outsider status, taking pride in the snark and attitude of their postings. So it is perhaps ironic (but bloggers tend to like irony) that beneath the ultra-cool surface you're likely to find scribblers yearning to reach you the old-school way, from a TV screen or from between the covers of a book."

"Snark"? "Ultra-cool"? Jesus...

"'Every so-called professional blogger I know wants to work for print,' says Melissa Lafsky, 27, a lawyer whose popular blog at Opinionistas.com led to her finding a book agent, quitting her big law-firm job and starting a novel based on her blog. 'There's still that desire for legitimacy. I'll admit it: I'll feel like a real writer when I have something published in print. 'Til then, I feel I'm faking it. Most bloggers I've talked to feel the same way.'"

Maybe what she means is, she'll feel like a real writer when she gets paid for it.