Democratization and Meritocratization in Writing

Over the weekend I had a good friend who I hadn’t seen in a while visiting from out town. We got together for drinks at my local watering hole on Friday and proceeded to have a good night of it covering a range of topics and catching up on a variety of things. At one point in the night I asked him about the use of computers and mp3s in DJing, you see he is a long time DJ and I used to be a wannabe DJ (had the tables and mixer, bought a bunch of records, did a bunch of mixing, but never put the kind of time and energy into it to have it go anywhere). I said that it seemed to be a regular thing to see DJs playing with laptops now and that I had seen a picture on Facebook of him doing the same; I wanted to know what the deal was.

My friend explained that it is indeed standard fair for DJs to play with laptops and that mp3s are used as much as records these days with an interface software that allows the mp3s to be grafted onto control records that allow the DJ to spin as though they are doing so with an actual pressed version of the track rather than just a digital copy. I thought that was all pretty cool until he said that, in fact, there werew programs out there that would do all of the beat matchng for you, so that anyone could basically buy the software, the hardware, and the tracks an call themselves a DJ.

“So the old argument about DJs being nothing more than glorified cd players has come true…” I quipped, somewhat disappointed.

In part he said that was true, but that on some level the innovation of mp3s and software had also deeply democratized the project of DJing.

“It used to be that the best DJs were the best DJs because they had relationships with the record stores and when the new tracks would come in the store owners would put them aside for those DJs so that only a select few people had the most cutting edge selection,” he said, “If you were just starting out, you had to beg, borrow, and steal your way into getting decent tracks.” “Now,” he noted, “everyone has access to the same material, and that just seems a lot more fair, despite the lamentable impact its had on the image of being a DJ.”

I thought about that for a bit and then proposed what I thought looked like a possible silver lining, suggesting that over time the democratizing impact of mp3s and computer software would actually have a corresponding meritocratizing effect on DJing. My reasoning was that if everyone had access to the same material, then how you chose to play that material — what kind of obscure or interesting tracks you were able to dig up, what order you chose to play them in, how you read a crowd and were able to adapt, and to what degree you were able to shape the sonic experience for the crowd — would eventually become even more important than it had been before. Becoming a great DJ, on the whole, would be a more difficult and nuanced task than it had been previously; the essential tradition of turntablism would find a way of not just surviving, but flourishing in spite and in the midst of technological advaces.

He agreed that that was already the case for many people.

I relay that story to you because I think it sheds some light on how I feel about the seeming inevitable demise of the print media industry that Freddie decried last week and what some of the longer term impacts might be should we choose to view this unavoidable collapse as containing some measure of opportunity.

Now, I’m not so pessimistic as to assume that the print media is going to disappear altogether, I think it is likely that newspapers and magazines will stick around in some fashion or another. There is always going to be a purist crowd who are going to rail against the digitization of all their informatin and demand there is a qualitiative difference between the two mediums that doesn’t boil down to the type of work purveyors of each see themselves doing. But such an incarnation of print media will of necessity greatly diminish its influence, scope, and pervasiveness. Print media seems destined not to blink out of existence, but rather become a very niche market.

It is also true that currently there is a kind of quality writing and reporting housed solely within the print media that isn’t obviously going to be replaced by their online counterparts. But it doesn’t seem obviously true to me that that will always and necessarily be the case; there is nothing that inherently precludes online journalism from adapting in such a way as to seek to elevate quality in the face of drastic accessibility. Last month, Alan Jacobs posted a  piece at The American Scene suggesting certain parameters for what blogs can and can’t do, which I think can be extended to online journalism generally (though Jacobs may be inclined to correct my assumption). Jacobs argued that the nature of blogs were such that they just don’t do long form writing or in-depth discussion very well, which is somewhat difficult to with if one takes a moment to look around. But that notion of the limits of blogging is, I think, a cultural argument that describes not an immutable element of the structure or form of blogging, but rather an observation about the set of behavioural norms that have built up around the enterprise. I remain fairly convinced that those norms can be changed, not without some considerable pushing and negotiating, but changed all the same.

This ties into my long-running rant about how people comport themselves online. We have a certain sense of freedom about what we do and how we go about doing it with online writing because we have the perception of being the shorter, scrawnier brother/sister to the print media. Online writing, while a growing phenomenon, doesn’t get taken seriously against the backdrop of tradition print media, so why should we really care about instilling mores of professionalism and integrity? And yet, our older sibling having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, we are rapidly running our of credible excuses against the need to rapidly grow up to the responsibility of housing a reliable and widely accessible platform for information exchange and consumption.

And while the analogy isn’t a perfect one, I think  that the same democratizing tendencies that have resulted in an overall elevation of quality in my related story have every bit as good a chance of operating in the world of online writing. That there are more voices out there than you can shake a stick at means that the noise to signal ratio is somewhat abominable, but it also means that you don’t have the laurels of just doggedly working your way up through the newspaper industry to rest your voice on. Now, obviously there will be these kinds of professional entities online, but the point is that they won’t provide the only means of letting one’s self be heard — and they won’t have been operating in this medium first. As more and more of the news consumption audience makes it way online, there will be ever more competition for their attention with a veritable sea of voice clamoring for effect. Over time, it will be the reputation economy that separates the wheat from the chaff. It won’t just be the fact that you have a platform, anyone will be able to have a platform, but it will intrinsically be how you are able to use that platform: the quality of your thoughts, the dexterity you display in articulating them, and, perhaps uniquely to this medium, the skillful means you display in interacting with an audience that is now able to immediately and forcefully provide you with feed/push back.

The truly great writers, those that rise to a certain level of notoriety, are much more likely to be those who truly excel at what they do and do so with a passion that affects people in this intellectual marketplace than who you happen to know and what favours you’ve done for them and theirs. Or at least the deep democracy that purveys such a marketplace stands to ward off that kind of information monopolization much better than our current situation.

None of which is to say that there won’t be significant and painful bumps along the way and I don’t look upon the idea of an entire industry going under as cause for celebration. But what will be will be, and one entity’s end is another entity’s beginning. The real question is what we see this as the beginning of…

Tagged as: Alan Jacobs, blogging, democratization, writing