Back in 1999, having somehow not heard that print magazines were in trouble, I started the one you're now reading.
Shortly afterwards, I read a column in Newsweek about Michael Kelly, one of the nation's brightest journalists, who had just become the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Kelly was going against the biggest trend in media. The Internet, he said, was producing "a great wash of talk, blather, chatter," quite a lot of it inaccurate and ill-considered. He wanted to create an antidote: a type of magazine the column called a "thought leader," one that featured lengthy, contemplative, carefully edited pieces. That was what I was trying to do with Towerview, and it was what I hoped to do with my career. I took the column as gospel;
I clipped it out and taped it behind my Chronicle office desk.
Michael Kelly died on the job five years ago, and if you believe almost everyone who comments on the media, print journalism will soon be joining him. I work at Newsweek now, and although I know plenty of people who read the mag in dead-tree form -hi, Mom-most of my friends and, I suspect, most young people who read it do so online.
There are a lot of journalists who bemoan this fact. Yes, they know online content can be enriched, and enriching, in all kinds of ways that print can't. Yes, they understand that the screen is often just another way to distribute the same content they've always produced. (As a commenter on angryjournalist.com recently put it: "Beer used to be delivered in wagons. Now it comes in trucks. But you know what? It's still beer.") Nonetheless, they see the Internet as inferior. They worry that their sites will never make enough money; that the web's
demand for content is impossible to satisfy; that, as a friend of mine likes to say, converting words from print to online is "like taking an actor off his beautiful stage and making him do street theater."
Mostly, they complain that the Internet dumbs people down.
In June, the Atlantic suggested in a cover story that on-screen reading was rendering us all incapable of absorbing long-form, complex content. The headline: "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"
Well? Is it? None of these complaints are new. The Newsweek column I was so attached to in 1999 contained all the gripes I've just listed. The fact that we're still having the same arguments nine years later is comforting, in a way-it means we haven't gotten so "stoopid" that we've stopped considering these issues. It also means there are still a lot of print folks around to defend their side. But I have to admit that lately, I've been thinking a lot about stupidity and the web, because increasingly, I'm encountering too much of the former on the latter.
Before I go any further, let me emphasize that I'm very pro-web; information wants to be free, and all that. There's wonderful writing and thought to be found on the Internet. (I just quoted a commenter, if you didn't notice.)
But there's also a lot of crap. The onus of telling the difference now falls solely on the reader. Call me a Luddite, but I like picking up a magazine knowing that editors and fact-checkers have winnowed it to high-quality, credible stuff. On the web, that doesn't always happen. A journalist or expert can spend months or years trying to understand and accurately portray a subject in an article, then have all that work wiped out by anonymous commenters spreading disinformation with no concern for civility, credibility, or punctuation. The reader is left to decide whom to trust. Too often, his only guideline is caveat lector: a good rule of thumb, but not a sufficient one.
I realize that this point, too, is not all that new: I'm sure 15th-century monks were horrified by the printing press, and we can all be thankful that they didn't manage to stop many people from buying newly available books. So I'd like to take the point a little further. Let's think for a minute about why there's so much crap on the Internet. Google didn't produce that stuff. People did. Google didn't make them "stoopid." A shamefully broken educational system - and a society that devalues critical thought - did. If there is a mixture of intelligent and idiotic content on the web, that's not the web's fault; it's a reflection of society at large.
Duke students, of course, don't all live in society at large. They have the advantage of a high-level education; they have more opportunities and tools than a lot of people do. This is what critics mean when they say Dukies are "privileged." Let's face it; we are. So I'd like to issue a challenge to students reading this column: Use your privilege wisely.
To the electrical engineering majors and tech whizzes: figure out some way to help people sift through the Internet, to tell the bad from the good. And to the rest of you: make more of the good stuff. Start your own thoughtful blogs; leave comments that are long and backed up by citations; drown out the bad stuff. That Newsweek column I read so many years ago concluded that "thought leader" magazines probably wouldn't survive the rise of the web. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But in an age when everyone has a voice, those of us with good educations must do the work that used to be the responsibility of those magazines. Being a journalist may be my job, but being a thought leader is a job that has to fall to all of us now.
Mary Carmichael, now a senior writer at Newsweek, graduated from Duke in 2001. She was the first editor of Towerview.
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