One of the most memorable book pans of the last several years was Anne Applebaum's review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, that coy Wikipedia entry that attempted to explain the narcissism of the tiny difference between the Allied and Axis powers in World War II. Baker's method was to assemble a collection of anecdotes and qutotations from both sides, divorce them from context and any sense of proportion, and timestamp them as if with gnostic certitude in the law of moral equivalence. Narrative didn't enter into it, and so two juxtaposed parlor comments would have the credulous reader coming away thinking that Franklin Roosevelt was little more than a chair-bound Adolph Eichmann. By way of offering her own context for the sorry cultural atmosphere that could produce such a flimsy, ahistorical work of history, Applebaum opened with a remark once made by my former employer:
“The ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.
“And it’s 100 words long.
“200 max.
“Any good idea can be expressed at that length.”
As someone once tasked with explaining the veracity of the peak oil idea and the controversy over Chris Anderson's "long tail" thesis of online consumption in 200 words of fewer, I can attest that that is indeed the ideal Gawker item. But as to whether all good ideas can be reduced to feuilletons and drive-by observations, or whether every bit of conventional wisdom deserves to be turned on its head, I'm not so sure. There's probably a symposium about this modern problem somewhere on YouTube, if you can bother to sit through the whole thing.
Ben Macintyre has a nice essay in the London Times about how technology--from blogs to PDAs--has spelt the end of long-form narrative, most depressingly that oldest form of human entertainment, storytelling:
Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.
Macintyre goes on to explain that there's actually a budding industry in Japan for bite-sized, cyberspoken fiction tailored to such shrinking attention spans and delivered to handheld device single pages at a time. So while the Internet, clearinghouse for fact-checks and personality disorders that it is, may be able to stop the next Marx in his tracks by an "epic fail" tweet or a withering status update, how long before Tolstoy begins to look like this?
Levin: :) hello hello :)
Kitty: um, hi
Kitty: heeeeyy!!!!!
Vronsky: User has signed off and did not receive your Gchat.
Vronsky: ;-)
Anna: <3
Karenin: you there?
Anna: sorry, busy.
Levin: long time...
Kitty: hi!!! :)
Vronsky: ?
Anna: :-/
Vronsky: ugh
Anna: later
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