Carr and Kakutani in Conversation
SUPA training
July 12, 2012
Heather: Oh man, I’m finding it difficult to get through all these long critical articles for SUPA training.
Carr: I know what you mean. I used to be able to sit and read for hours, and now I find myself constantly skipping from one thing to the next, looking for a new distraction after just reading a couple of pages. I’m convinced it has to do with my internet usage. Over the last ten years, it’s like my brain has be rewired to prefer the rapid pace of skimming through digital media rather than immersing myself in one particular piece of writing.
Heather: Well that may have something to do with it for me as well, but I think the sleep deprivation is more to blame! I know what you’re talking about though. It seems there has been a radical shift in the way we are trained to process information. When I was working as an editor with an online travel magazine, I was always encouraged to promote ‘list’ style articles that easily broke up topics. Published articles should be easy to skim. The purpose was often to get page views, not to publish the best content.
Kakutani: I’ve seen a similar trend in print media. A book was published by David Shields, a man who actually has written a novel, that consists of 618 fragments taken from other authors. He didn’t even want to include references to who he stole his quotations from. What does that say about what we’re reading? Do we as an audience want to read only what can be processed in small chunks? One research, Mr. Lanier, has claimed that nowadays the mash-up is more important than the original article!
Heather: Oh tell me about it! My boss was always frantically emailing our editorial team to produce mash-ups of whatever topic was currently trending. It was disillusioning, because more praise was given for publishing a short mash-up that got a lot of page views than for amazing non-fiction pieces that addressed important social issues. I ultimately left the magazine when our boss decided editors wouldn’t be paid salary any more; we’d have to rely on page view bonuses for income. This structure didn’t encourage the publication of in-depth, meaningful articles that I liked to publish but that take a lot time when working with authors. Instead, it encouraged editors to publish whatever was currently popular and may garner a lot of traffic.
Carr: I think that’s one of the downsides of what’s happened to our brains as a result of web usage. “Our mind expects to take in information...in a swiftly moving stream of particles” like riding on a jet ski. We no longer have the patience, or even the reading skills, to dive into those deeper and more meaningful articles. Unfortunately editors and publishers have to change to meet the demands of their consumers. Even the New York Times made a major change recently by devoting some of the front pages to abstracts.
Kakutani: That’s the thing, even the media industry as a whole is changing. The concept of the author, and of who owns words and concepts, is changing in our culture. Authors are expected to market their own work, and if they don’t, they won’t be successful.
Heather: I know. In order to establish myself as a travel writer, I had to build up a Twitter profile, a personal web page and try to promote articles via several different social media tools. It seems authors nowadays, especially those just starting out, need to invest more in social media and building their own audience than in their writing.