Tom Morris

You guys know that I'm not overtly cynical about the blogosphere or about tech. I'm cynical about a lot of other things - politics, religion, intellectuals, in fact large chunks of social life.

But I have to be a little cynical about user-generated content. It's not really as important as everyone makes it out to be.

I agree with John Battelle, for instance, when he says that the New York Times doesn't quite get it yet. True. Quite a lot of newspapers don't get it, and quite a lot of broadcast organisations don't get it. But what is it?

It - that is, conversational media, UGC, Web 2.0 - isn't as important as we make it out to be. Yes, we all use it. But if you think that we've got very far, come with me on my commute. How many people do you see reading or producing conversational media? Well, there's me. I'm probably reading sometime on my Palm Pilot or my laptop (when it works) from a blog or writing up a post.

But I am outnumbered many, many times over by the people reading the newspapers. And that's because all of the ways that one views conversational media aren't well suited to being consumed inside a metal box filled with other people.

There are a lot of iPod users on the train, but how many of them are listening to independent music and podcasts? Very few, I'd imagine. iPods are still used primarily for listening to music.

We can dream about conversational media, but we shouldn't get our dreams confused with reality - which is still dominated by newspapers, magazines and "old media".

What we need to do is find ways of getting new media in to the places where old media sits. We need a "print aggregator" - which would pull a few interesting, feature-length articles from sites you like and print them automatically. So if you are getting ready to leave work, you open up your print aggregator, hit print, wait a minute or two and grab the pieces of paper. You've got yourself a little magazine to read but it's made up of interesting things from sources you like.

PDA newsreaders need to improve. Online readers like Google Reader are fine, but they need to synchronise with offline applications so that people can read interesting stuff on their Palms, Treos and PocketPC devices. The same is true for video.

Comments | TrackBack

Paul Levinson makes a now familiar argument about television - claiming that television has entered a real golden age, with more excellent drama series being produced than ever before. See Rome, The Sopranos, The Wire, Da Ali G Show, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, 24, Big Love and Weeds as examples of groundbreaking and risk-taking dramas being produced for (American) television. I agree absolutely with the evidence but not the conclusion. I could list numerous British TV shows which fit the same model.

But Levinson's argument fails to take account of the strength of the anti-TV arguments from critics like Neil Postman who never argued that television isn't entertaining. These shows, among many others, are raising television drama to higher and higher peaks of excellence. I'd even agree that they are more complex and require better preparation to follow.

The important criticism that Postman brought was a fairly simple one - that fields of life which are dealt with on television adopt a new type of context - entertainment. Postman said of television: "it has made entertainment itself the natural format of the representation of all experience... entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure".

The point isn't that television is rubbish, but rather that television isn't the appropriate medium to cover non-entertainment topics. And that topics like politics, science, religion, public policy, war, technology and so on aren't best judged by how entertaining they are. What matters about Iraq is that more than 3,000 Allied troops have died and more than half a million of Iraqis have died. What matters about July the 7th was that a small group of dedicated, religious nutcases got on to Tube trains and killed a whole bunch of people. And yet we pick our prime ministers based on whether they play the guitar, listen to Oasis, ride a bicycle around Hyde Park Corner and how polished their "media message" is.

If you think that the excellence of Lost disproves criticism of television, switch on Fox News and watch Bill O'Reilly for half an hour. Switch on Jerry Falwell's show or read up on Oral Roberts, "prosperity theology" and the fact that televangelists spent two-thirds of their fundraising time telling their flock that if they send cash, they'll get a miracle from God who'll give it back. That sort of television is the reason why heartbreaking stories appear every so often of terminally-ill people following faith healers across thousands of miles and donate thousands of dollars to hucksters in flashy suits.

Television doesn't suck if you exclude all the bits that suck. And the bits that suck tend to be the non-fictional bits. Talking heads after talking heads, idiotic commentators (honestly, watch or listen to a book review show sometime and tell me that a group of random people off the street couldn't do a better job), repetetive news cycles, moral panics, phatically mumbling politicians, personality politics. If you exclude fiction and drama, television really sucks. We forget Postman's lessons at our peril.

Comments | TrackBack