Contemporaeity

Dan Visel at the Institute for the Future of the Book writes about how con­tem­po­rary and reac­tionary blogs must be. With blogs, he writes, peo­ple check the most recent entries to see what is new. After all, that’s how blogs work. The most recent news gets top billing.

As a result, it’s hard for dig­i­tal forms of writ­ing to track long-term issues. Visel looks at this through the media cov­er­age of the Iraq War and Virginia Tech killings. Mainstream out­lets like the New York Times reported on the killings far more often than on the war dur­ing a one week span. This is because, as Visel writes, main­stream media deal best with sharply punc­tu­ated events.

Finally, Visel won­ders whether our mod­ern forms of writ­ing and media are good enough to track the long-term issues. It’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion. Our local news­pa­per recently ran a series of sto­ries deal­ing with the home­less in Bozeman, Mont. It is a long-term issue that the com­mu­nity is deal­ing with, but it is also one that has only recently come into the spot­light. The news series was a reac­tion to recent pub­lic concern.

Does that make the home­less sit­u­a­tion any less long-term? Not really, but this case is sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent than main­stream media. Here, the pub­lic eye turned toward the home­less prob­lem before the sto­ries were writ­ten. The media did not nec­es­sar­ily draw that atten­tion there–it may have helped draw addi­tional atten­tion, but not the first atten­tion. With the New York Times and other main­stream out­lets, their choice of what to report can decide where the public’s atten­tion will go.

Accordingly, if the main­stream media reports on only short-term issues, like the Virginia Tech killings, then the atten­tion of those who rely on main­stream media for their news will be focused their as well. And here’s the kicker: peo­ple seem to want break­ing news. It’s what they’ve come to expect. I have a feel­ing that this is why we see fewer and fewer major inves­tiga­tive sto­ries on the nightly news or in our newspapers.

Yet another anom­aly exists. Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series. On this show, a reporter chron­i­cles a sting oper­a­tion aimed at sex­ual preda­tors who would abuse under­age peo­ple they met over the Internet. This show is intrigu­ing and addic­tive. It is also quite pop­u­lar, if my house­hold is any indi­ca­tion. Certainly, this is a long-term issue. Their results do not make the front page of any paper or Web site, but the show remains popular.

So, tele­vi­sion, per­haps with is episodic for­mat, can deal with long-term issues. It would stand to rea­son, then, that any medium which is peri­odic (news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines too) could also deal well with long-term issues, pro­vided they have a steady read­er­ship. This is where I think the Web loses.

Most Web site vis­i­tors are spo­radic. Their read­ing pat­ters are ephemeral and incon­stant. Sure, they may visit nytimes.com reg­u­larly, but how reg­u­larly? Every time they remem­ber to go there? Every day? It’s uncer­tain. Because of this, it is hard for Web sites to main­tain steady readership–the kind that would be needed to fol­low a series of sto­ries over a period of time. Because the atten­tion span on the Web is shorter, the story arcs must be as well.

Form fol­lows func­tion in this case.

More to come on this and other blog issues soon.

Related posts:

1. Crying over spilled ink
2. Philosophical Babble