Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may know that I have a strong interest in the looming death of printed newspapers. So I found a recent article from Harpers Online particularly interesting. Richard Rodriguez’ “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper” tells the story of the San Francisco Chronicle, and how it came to define and reflect the city in which it was based. It’s certainly worth reading; go do that now if you haven’t already. I’ll wait for you.
Wasn’t that interesting? The part that most struck me was when Rodriguez writes the following:
[W]ho will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.
For many of us, the world online has become more important than the city around us. It is no wonder, then, that newspapers – once the epitome of locality – are in a sorry state. Rodriguez argues that this is a loss of an entire way of life – that in the future we will have “one and a half cities: Washington, D.C. and American Idol.” The death of the newspaper is to him the death of the American city as a whole, the elimination of any uniqueness that a particular tract of land might have. The result is a café full of drones locked in a “wi-fi séance,” none of them talking or even looking at one another.
I can certainly see where Rodriguez is coming from, but I must disagree about the ultimate effects. The Chronicle began as the… chronicle, you could say, of a small town. Everyone knew everyone else, and the newspaper served as the codification and persistent memory of the place. As cities became larger and larger, newspapers by necessity became more and more selective about what qualified as “news” and about whose goings-on deserved to be recorded and shared. The “spirit of a place” became more about the spirit of the place’s most important people than about the everyday actions of ordinary people.
The Internet, and social media in particular, is re-defining the boundaries of the “small town” mode of living. Newspapers faced limitations of reporter salaries, materials, printing costs, and delivery for papers that would have to become much thicker in order to keep the same kind of focus. The burden of producing the news, however, has largely shifted to the consumers of the news themselves, as if the New York Times took submissions (and published!) from anyone willing to send them a story. Plus, since computers are very good at sorting and filtering records, consumers of social media are not required to thumb through hundreds of pages of newsprint. This lets social media act as a focused lens on the goings-on of select groups of people, while still having coverage broad enough to support hundreds of cities. A one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it newspaper that purports to cover an entire city (and surrounding metropolitan area) can’t hope to compete with the customized, precision focus of social media. To use Seth Godin’s phrase, newspapers are no longer a “Purple Cow,” they are now simply an average product for average people. And no one likes to think of themselves as average.
Yes, the shift to social media has definitely taken a toll on notions of place and space. But how accurate were those notions to begin with? Cities, like nations, are imaginary concepts; there is no physical line in the sand to separate the city from the plain, everyday land around it, anymore than there is a physical line in the ground demarcating one country from another (the proposed fencing-off of Mexico notwithstanding). If you live on the fringe, then people on the fringe are part of your community; it’s not that you are part of a city and your neighbors are not solely because of what side of an imaginary line they live on. Cities, then, function solely as generalized markers on a scale of place – it’s more convenient to tell someone that you live “near Atlanta” than to give them latitude and longitude coordinates (too narrow) or “in Georgia” (too broad). As the population of the US becomes more mobile and fluid, this is becoming the main purpose that cities serve. The majority of people I’ve met since moving to Miami are similarly not from Miami; everyone brings their own ideas of community and we throw them in a pot and stir them up, and I wouldn’t call the result “Miami culture” because I still don’t know what “Miami culture” would even be. In that sense, I’ve already lost track of place. My “place” is now the people I communicate with online, regardless of where they are – I’ve drawn my own imaginary lines to indicate who is and isn’t part of a city of my own making, of my own newspaper. And that social media “newspaper” works in much the same way as the original San Francisco Chronicle – I get a codified, recorded history of everything that happens in my “city.”
What about you, readers? Are you still firmly rooted in place-ness, or have you cut free of your physical shackles? (How’s that working out for you?)
Photo by Mike Bailey-Gates.
Living in Nowhere-Land
Wasn’t that interesting? The part that most struck me was when Rodriguez writes the following:
For many of us, the world online has become more important than the city around us. It is no wonder, then, that newspapers – once the epitome of locality – are in a sorry state. Rodriguez argues that this is a loss of an entire way of life – that in the future we will have “one and a half cities: Washington, D.C. and American Idol.” The death of the newspaper is to him the death of the American city as a whole, the elimination of any uniqueness that a particular tract of land might have. The result is a café full of drones locked in a “wi-fi séance,” none of them talking or even looking at one another.
I can certainly see where Rodriguez is coming from, but I must disagree about the ultimate effects. The Chronicle began as the… chronicle, you could say, of a small town. Everyone knew everyone else, and the newspaper served as the codification and persistent memory of the place. As cities became larger and larger, newspapers by necessity became more and more selective about what qualified as “news” and about whose goings-on deserved to be recorded and shared. The “spirit of a place” became more about the spirit of the place’s most important people than about the everyday actions of ordinary people.
The Internet, and social media in particular, is re-defining the boundaries of the “small town” mode of living. Newspapers faced limitations of reporter salaries, materials, printing costs, and delivery for papers that would have to become much thicker in order to keep the same kind of focus. The burden of producing the news, however, has largely shifted to the consumers of the news themselves, as if the New York Times took submissions (and published!) from anyone willing to send them a story. Plus, since computers are very good at sorting and filtering records, consumers of social media are not required to thumb through hundreds of pages of newsprint. This lets social media act as a focused lens on the goings-on of select groups of people, while still having coverage broad enough to support hundreds of cities. A one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it newspaper that purports to cover an entire city (and surrounding metropolitan area) can’t hope to compete with the customized, precision focus of social media. To use Seth Godin’s phrase, newspapers are no longer a “Purple Cow,” they are now simply an average product for average people. And no one likes to think of themselves as average.
Yes, the shift to social media has definitely taken a toll on notions of place and space. But how accurate were those notions to begin with? Cities, like nations, are imaginary concepts; there is no physical line in the sand to separate the city from the plain, everyday land around it, anymore than there is a physical line in the ground demarcating one country from another (the proposed fencing-off of Mexico notwithstanding). If you live on the fringe, then people on the fringe are part of your community; it’s not that you are part of a city and your neighbors are not solely because of what side of an imaginary line they live on. Cities, then, function solely as generalized markers on a scale of place – it’s more convenient to tell someone that you live “near Atlanta” than to give them latitude and longitude coordinates (too narrow) or “in Georgia” (too broad). As the population of the US becomes more mobile and fluid, this is becoming the main purpose that cities serve. The majority of people I’ve met since moving to Miami are similarly not from Miami; everyone brings their own ideas of community and we throw them in a pot and stir them up, and I wouldn’t call the result “Miami culture” because I still don’t know what “Miami culture” would even be. In that sense, I’ve already lost track of place. My “place” is now the people I communicate with online, regardless of where they are – I’ve drawn my own imaginary lines to indicate who is and isn’t part of a city of my own making, of my own newspaper. And that social media “newspaper” works in much the same way as the original San Francisco Chronicle – I get a codified, recorded history of everything that happens in my “city.”
What about you, readers? Are you still firmly rooted in place-ness, or have you cut free of your physical shackles? (How’s that working out for you?)
Photo by Mike Bailey-Gates.