- a) can consummate the purpose of this blog by responding emotionally to the stuff I put out there
- b) can give me crucial feedback. Believe me: I have like six readers, I'll listen if you tell me something constructive.
This isn't hypothetical: As for (a), it's just good to know that someone likes it. I write for myself but it's nice to make someone else's day a little brighter. As for (b), I'm not just blowing smoke. I often learn from your feedback after you call me out when I write indefensibly difficult sentences, when I take a premise too far, when I take a premise not far enough, when I dawdle with the intro a bit, or when I should have dawdled with the intro and didn't. Actually, yesterday, when I wrote that fantasy series intro, that piece's composition was about 50% txting of the teen characters and 50% longform prose when they meet in person. Someone called me out on it and the piece has been fixed to be 100% txting. Because that's way better.
And, whatever the hell you are, my Reader, I know that if you're reading this, you don't want your time wasted. Oh, you might want me to pass time, but you want me to make it worth your while, not necessarily in practical terms but in artistic terms. Even if you're tired and looking to unwind with a lighthearted piece, time is the most precious commodity in the world, and there's something philosophically important for me to treating your time as such.
I'm not going to tear down others to make myself look better, and I wouldn't be able to do so successfully: There are innumerable articles and sites out there that are sharp, brilliant, and entertaining (no doubt you're aware of many of them). But simply to get to the heart of the matter: I think I got my respect for readers' time in part as a real backlash against this recent, cynical trend of clickbait that seems to be part of the proverbial sausage of every big publication targeted at younger people.
I read - that is to say, I seek out and get tricked into clicking in somewhat of a 50/50 ratio - so many articles that are written with ironic premises. And not like Jonathan Swift; I mean more like... Hate-watching The Newsroom... Watching reality TV and cattily criticizing characters... Writing "Hot Sports Takes" in order to demonstrate that we're (as in the author's audience) collectively better than Rick Reilly. The Reilly pieces themselves. Counter-intuitive pitches for the sake of counter-intuitive pitches. Niches filled for the sake of filling niches.
Yes, they're mostly pretty trivial, touching only incidentally on things that directly affect us, and most of them are pretty poor - on an editor's command, a not-so-guileless young writer produces prose consistently and arbitrarily, and all of this with just enough literary and verbal intelligence thrown in to hook you in if you're not careful or, like myself at one point, if these things are genuinely new to you. But they work in business terms. Whether something is potentially "shareable" seems to be the principal criterion for whether something is worth setting that young writer to.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. The solution is obvious. Turn it off. Don't just critique and keep reading: Stop it. Okay, absolutely, I hear you. But... before I click away from "think-pieces" and so on of this nature forever, can I say something? Can we as a culture stop justifying or defending these things just because they're popular?
Clickbait is evil. It really, really is. And you don't have to be a populist to say it. Clickbait is produced often times through a site owned by a large, faceless, Moriarty-esque media conglomerate, and it's alright to make that connection and realize that it's another form of soft exploitation, another way that the people with highly-concentrated power and low institutional respect for diversity of media voices homogenize and limit our culture's potential and don't even justify it, hell, don't even have to justify it, but only have to report their social media numbers to hungry investors. Okay, let me step back: It's not so much that clickbait is evil, it's that clickbait exists to make money, exists to make money and increase prestige for what is most often a conglomerate, and exists to make money often as not at the expense of your time. You are the product they're selling, and so the question becomes: Are you getting what you're paying for? It's a serious question which has made me pause in my tracks, somewhat.
I'm not making a populist argument here, nor am I making an elitist argument: Of course there are people that like that stuff, and I'm not denigrating their artistic taste. I'm not advocating censorship or "truth in advertising" applied to Twitter (though that would be quite amusing. Heh). I guess what I'm saying is... a thousand banalities today - few maliciously so, but many indifferently - threaten your time. And if you (as I do) have personal standards that exclude click-bait, and an attention span that nevertheless clicks anyway? Then perhaps we need to be on constant, systemic guard against such distractions, bookmarking the sites that appeal to us, blacklisting the sites that don't, using more voices and smaller voices, all of which respect our time and our input. And yes, this is a personal question, and one man's hack is another's heaven, I'm sure. And I'm not even saying this to promote my own site - really, it's one site and it's a big world outside the site. I'll be damned if I ever forget that. Whatever the case, I'm saying... find your authors, find the people that respect you and that you respect in turn, that don't just write topically to your demographic but that write poignantly to you - and be loyal to them, be effusive in your praise and feedback to them, and click on everything they write, until you move on, and then find another one of your authors. If I can achieve 10% of what I'm talking about here, that would be spectacular.
This post originally started because of a Slate article wondering if "The Onion" was funny. I thought this was the most absurd possible premise, but I read it anyway, as if by classical conditioning. It wasn't worth the three minutes the article took me, and the two minutes to have an opinion and to think about sharing my opinion. It wasn't worth anything. It was just a voice of nothing shouting into a sea of nothing. I don't ever want to be an un-ironic commentator, but after reading that Slate piece I realized something had to change for me, and this piece is written as much for my benefit of expressing it as it is sincere advice. Also, yes, if you're wondering, yes, the Slate piece was that bad. It was life-changingly bad.
Anyway, that's about all I have to say on the matter. Thanks, as always, for your time. Heh.
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