No, Sotto Voce is not dead. I’ve been busy writing elsewhere — on Channel 37 of course, along with the usual magazine articles, a local paper, client newsletters, the MWA newsletter, etc. etc. But I feel the urge to check in here too.
I feel a change coming on for SV as my writing life continues to move in interesting new directions. It was a neat experiment to use SV as the incubator for the story that sparked the whole Channel 37 adventure. I’ve been doing a lot of storyboarding and development offline, but it hasn’t felt like the kind of stuff that’s best worked out in an online space the way The Terror from the Other Dimension did. So I’m starting to think about other kinds of “born digital” expression that I can play with here in my little incubator. Kind of like typecasting used to be, I’m looking for something that lets me play with the form as well as the expression of words. I have some ideas circling around in my head, fun nonlinear things that would be more like free-association warmup exercises that would help loosen me up for writing.
I write every morning, but that’s gotten to be such a habit that I need to add something new to the mix to liven things up. Something visual? Ah, I think I have the beginnings of a glimmer of an idea . . .
In 2010, it’s a cliche to say “it’s a cliche to say ‘it’s a cliche to say that the media landscape is undergoing a fundamental upheaval.'” We all know it, we’re all living it daily. In big and small ways, the way we seek and receive news, information, and entertainment looks different from even last year. It’s beyond truism at this point.
As Old Journalism struggles to understand New Journalism, it has bumped up against the Web philosophy that to be successful you must understand your audience, and it doesn’t entirely know what to make of it. The fact that this is a news flash reflects less on journalism as a whole than on how some people practice it — any good writer, of any kind, anywhere, knows that you have to understand your audience — but the naivete that leads people to think that this is some kind of a new thing is causing them to draw some pretty mistaken — and unintentionally hilarious — conclusions that make them look like utter fossils. For example: not even knowing who their target web audience is in the first place.
Take for instance the latest article by the estimable and usually very astute and insightful Alan Mutter, first published on E&P and republished on his blog: Digital Natives: More different than you think. It’s about a recent study undertaken in France that detonates the stunning bombshell that “young people have utterly different attitudes than their elders with respect to such seminal concepts as, say, institutional authority. ”
Damn whippersnappers!
According to the study — which, by the way, took three months to interview a statistically insignificant sample of 100 kids (you know those French) — your average 18- to 24-year-old digital natives:
“don’t trust politicians, social institutions, the media or corporations”
“can’t get enough information fast enough”
“view life as a game of outsmarting authority to beat a system they disdain”
“enjoys using all tools available in his arsenal to outsmart the merchant system”
In the history of humankind, has there ever been a group of 18- to 24-year-olds who didn’t? I mean aside from the preppies, the squares, the jocks, and the Young Republicans.
According to Mutter, the implications for newspapers are:
“This pretty much rejects everything newspapers stand for.”
“Newspapers are the antithesis of the empty info-calories often preferred by Digital Natives.”
“The most satisfying way a Digital Native can interact with a newspaper is to argue with it.”
“This . . . suggests the obsolescence of advertising as we know it.”
Oh, for the love of God. It’s like listening to Barry Goldwater rant against them damn hippies.
In other words, what the study has really revealed to newsmen is not that the Web has fostered a new kind of readership that demands a new kind of journalism. What the study has revealed is that journalists are older than the people who don’t now, and who never did, read newspapers. If there’s an issue at all here, it isn’t a technological one. It’s generational.
But see, this is all actually good news for journalism. It means that there’s really nothing new to see here. There has never been a time when kids didn’t believe that adults just don’t get it, or when adults didn’t believe that kids speak a different language. There has never been a time when dramatic changes in technology didn’t completely disrupt how people talk to each other and upend social mores and confuse the shit out of everyone. And there has never, ever been a time when the 18-24 demographic ever gave a flying rat’s ass about newspapers. The digital revolution is just like any other revolution. It’s brand new, and it’s not new at all.
The bad news for journalism is that this study hammers one more nail into the coffin where the “ZOMG The Web Killed Newspapers” myth lives during daylight hours. It means that newspaper owners can’t keep blaming Craigslist and Facebook for the demise of the Fourth Estate anymore. The back-office dimwits who merged newspapers into corporate behemoths that existed only to fuel quarterly dividends, who demanded the newsrooms become profit centers only to give away their content for free, who insisted on hitching the revenue wagon to a single volatile and fickle source, are the real culprits. The impact of the digital revolution was nothing that a sound business model couldn’t have weathered and even turned to its advantage. Bloggers didn’t kill the newspaper. It was the newspapers’ to lose. And the people who blame The Kids Today are the ones who lost it.
Failed business models aside, journalism has always been, and will always be, about crusty old editors sending out hardboiled reporters to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The InterWebs and the cellular phones and the MyFace and I-don’t-know-what-all haven’t changed that.
I’m always curious to read, in my blog stats, the search terms that dredge up Sotto Voce. Usually they’re fairly topically relevant, but this morning I found this one [minus a couple of typos]:
“nomadic crew of a spacecraft have their relative tranquility disturbed when they take on board a doctor”
If you Google this phrase without quotes, the top link is my page on Star Trek Film Reviews, in which most of these keywords are used at various points (though unfortunately not “nomadic” — I need to find a way to use that word more often). I scrolled down more of the Google results but didn’t find anything that looked like a promising result.
Now, this sounds like a cool plot for a short SF story. I mean, it could go so many ways: horror, comedy of errors, psychological thriller, drama. So here’s your writing prompt for the day, boys and girls: go forth and write a short story that runs with this plot. Wanna share it? Drop a link in the comments. As for me, sounds like it’s time for another installment of The Event Horizon.
And on the off chance that you, Dear Reader, are the person who did that search and now you have stumbled upon this humble entry, could you please leave a comment and let me know:
Is this a story you read or saw somewhere?
Is yes, when/if you find it, can you let me know what it’s called so I can read/watch it?
If not, is it a story you’re working on?
If so, and you post it on the web, would you share the link please?
I had the great good fortune to be an SF-lovin’ teenager during one of the Golden Eras of SF cinema, the early 1980s — The Empire Strikes Back, Blade Runner, Star Trek II, Tron, Aliens . . . movies that redefined, and in many ways continue to define, the boundaries of cinematic SF. One of my personal favorites from that era, though, is often overlooked and generally underrated: 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Now I’m going to risk apostasy by saying that I have always found 2001 to be a ponderous, pretentious piece of eye candy that smothers a decent SF story under a thick slathering of fake profundity. Great SFX, sure, but so what? Would you really want to travel to Jupiter in an awesome spaceship with only a couple of cardboard cutouts for company? Open the pod bay door please, Hal.
On the other hand, I think 2010 is a nimble, crisp story-well-told that puts interesting characters into a profound situation and captures their believable reactions. And it had a great score by David Shire, one of American cinema’s most undervalued assets. It’s one of those few movies that, whenever it pops up on TV, I’m doomed — I’ll have to watch it to the very end. And the SFX hold up pretty well after a quarter century too.
But the part that had the most lingering effect on me was this ten-second scene in the middle of a montage. Dr. Floyd (Roy Scheider) is boning up on his studies as he prepares to tag along with a Soviet crew traveling to Jupiter to find out what happened to the Discovery and astronaut Dave Bowman. See what he’s using? It’s the then-brand-new Apple IIc, the sexy cousin of the //e that I and all my friends were using at the time. But see, he’s using it at the beach! No plug! (The IIc didn’t have a battery.) And look at that tiny monitor!
The first time I saw the film, I asked myself: what will my Apple computer really look like in 2010? I made an appointment with myself to report back in a quarter century. At last it’s time to make my report.
That I would be using an Apple was never in doubt (such faith!). But other than that, everything was wide open. And I think it’s fair to say that the computers we have today — not just the Apple ones — are more science-fictional than my friends and I dared imagine (or secretly hope) back then. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Dr. Floyd would be using an iPad. But what about me? Well, I ended up eschewing the iPad in favor of a new iPad Nano — er, excuse me, iPod Touch — because I really need the extra portability that comes with the pocket size. Paired with the BT keyboard, it is absolutely my ideal field computer. I can write and edit complex, heavily formatted documents with it just fine from a coffee shop. That the Touch has scads more memory and processing power than the IIc goes without saying, not to mention the colossal internal storage (no floppy disks!) and external storage available on the Internet, which has come so insanely far since 1984, when I used my //e as a dumb terminal to dial up BBSs and my friends across town using a 28.8k modem.
I mean, heck, I’m reporting in from the future on a blog. Just imagine:
@heywoodfloyd: hey wake up! Getting weird signal fm Europa #leonov #monolith
My home machine isn’t as cutting edge, though it is still white and made of plastic and has an Apple logo, and it still could kick sand in a IIc’s face (if it were so inclined, which it isn’t). And it still has a few more miles to go before I trade up to something silver again. And if I really do start pining for something silver, I still have my trusty 12″ PowerBook in the basement. Man, now that was a computer.
So that’s my Report From the Future: the Apple computer that I will take to the beach in 2010 will fit in my pocket, will have no buttons, will carry entire libraries of books, music, movies, and TV shows inside, and will let me talk to anyone in the world right from the beach where I’m sitting reading Omni magazine and dreaming about traveling to distant worlds.
I have several really big writing and editing projects going on right now, all very time-intensive and with looming deadlines. They had all started out smaller and with staggered deadlines, but as is the nature of work for Large Institutions, the scale and the deadlines gradually morphed and meshed, like the grinding gears of some sort of freakish mechanical walking clockwork thunder-beast from hell whose gigantic gears can only be lubricated by the insertion of fresh freelancer-meat in between their cold, cold teeth.
So naturally I have been dreading the imminent arrival of The E-Mail, the one from my favorite editor, letting me know that “It’s That Time Again!” — time to get started on my next article for her bimonthly magazine, which I do enjoy writing but which I just couldn’t possibly fit into my schedule short of a wormhole opening up and depositing an extra dimension into our universe into which I could force it like some sort of cosmic overhead compartment.
And so, Fate being what it is, the e-mail arrived this morning. I shuddered when it arrived with a cheery ding! “Sorry I’m late getting this to you,” it began. Oh no, I thought. That means the deadline will be even sooner! My mood sank deeper as I scrolled through what felt like three acres of names of people to interview. My heart began to gallub irregularly at the sight of the word count. The deadline, I quailed silently as I reached the end of the e-mail, by now reading with only one eye barely open. Dear Gawd, shall I just kill myself now?
“Would November 24 be OK? That way you’ll be done before Thanksgiving!”
Suddenly, the clouds gave way to a rainbow, a phalanx of angels burst forth in hallelujahs, and a Monty Python-esque “16 Ton” weight was lifted off my shoulders. Son of a snitch that was a close-run thing.
To be safe, I’m changing my e-mail address so she can’t write me back and say “November? Did I say November? I meant September.”
Bless, you J_____ B_____, you are the best of editors.
Comments Off on I Could Just Kiss My Editor Right Now
In 2010, it’s a cliche to say “it’s a cliche to say ‘it’s a cliche to say that the media landscape is undergoing a fundamental upheaval.'” We all know it, we’re all living it daily. In big and small ways, the way we seek and receive news, information, and entertainment looks different from even last year. It’s beyond truism at this point.