Link: Brian Williams: Enough About You -- Dec. 25, 2006 .
This goes along with the TIME magazine pick of "You" as Person (People) of the Year."
I approve of the choice, if not all the Web 2.0 hype (I really don't want to relive the crash again, if it's OK with you hypsters out there).
Brian Williams has the best rated of all the TV anchor blogs (so says TV Newser. I have to believe Brian Stelter at TV Newser, because the old media newspaper site requires a registration to get into its walled garden, and I refuse to do it). (BTW, doesn't anybody suspect some of those TV "celebrity" blogs are ghost-written?)
I'd venture it's because Williams is the best writer of the group, and maybe the smartest. Disclaimer: I used to be an English teacher. Rent a clue. The best blogs are facilitated by the best writers. Now go take another English class, you blogger-wanna bees, and start lobbying to pay English teachers more too. Ever since the start of the blog movement, people have dismissed it as mere solipsism, naval-gazing. But that's old media smoke screen, because the good writers and thinkers are out there, and that's what this is ALL about. YOU.
Blogs are like having the fun part of your English composition class never end, with a real audience, instead of grades. Those of you who secretly or not-so-secretly loved that class, you know who you are. You loved it because you were good at it, and the class gave you the freedom to flex and stretch your writing muscles, for some people, for the very first time time in their lives.
And you should also know that in the Blogosphere, YOU RULE!
So Williams says below that at some point the returns start to diminish, because everybody's talking, but there's not enough listening going on.
But would the many talkers exist if no one were listening? Are all these blogs merely trees falling in a forest far away? No. That's why the term "USER" in UGC (user-generated content) is ridiculous. This is about INTERACTIVITY and online COMMUNITY. This is SOCIALLY-GENERATED CONTENT.
Starving artists and writers have affected the isolated garret mentality since forever. Now they can do it without getting consumption.
There were always voices that no one listened to. Some of those voices even turned out to be... oh, I don't know, EMILY DICKINSON? And some of those solipsistic self-publishers turned out to be... WALT WHITMAN? How about that? How on Earth did that ever happen?
And there was a reason online fans of the show Xena: Warrior Princess started cranking out novels and stories for an avid audience of other fans, creating a system of writers and readers feeding each other until... WOW, this nearly invisible little community started generating millions of hits, and new story installments started crashing servers, and even more impressive, the best of those fan-novelists graduated from that Xena "writing school" and published their original print novels, with a built-in fan base that some mid-list literary writers (and a goodly number of mid-list genre writers as well) would kill for.
Hey Brian, this isn't about an exploding cacophony of sound. This is about a SYSTEM, a feedback loop with its own thermostat. Let the system find its level, just like chat rooms did, before you pronounce it a Neo-Luddite horror (and Brian isn't doing that, btw, he's just being provocative and raising the issue, something smart people do, and I respect him for that).
Link: Brian Williams: Enough About You -- Dec. 25, 2006 .
NBC's Brian Williams From the Magazine | Person of the Year
Enough About You
We've made the media more democratic, but at what cost to our democracy?
By BRIAN WILLIAMS
Posted Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006
While the mainstream media were having lunch, members of the audience made other plans. They scattered and are still on the move, part of a massive migration. The dynamic driving it? It's all about you. Me. And all the various forms of the First Person Singular.
Americans have decided the most important person in their lives is ... them, and our culture is now built upon that idea. It's the User-Generated Generation.
For those times when the 900 digital options awaiting us in our set-top cable box can seem limiting and claustrophobic, there's the Web. Once inside, the doors swing open to a treasure trove of video: adults juggling kittens, ill-fated dance moves at wedding receptions, political rants delivered to camera with venom and volume. All of it exists to fill a perceived need. Media executives— some still not sure what it is — know only that they want it. And they're willing to pay for it.
[Heh, yeah. And there's a sucker born every minute. While there are some interesting innovations in marketing coming about these days, watching big media trying to "buy" authentic communities ought to be a hilarious spectator sport. Do these folks even REMEMBER the foolishness of the business community in the late 1990s?]
[...]
We've raised a generation of Americans on a mantra of love and the importance of self as taught by brightly colored authority figures with names like Barney and Elmo. On the theory that celebrating only the winners means excluding those who place, show or simply show up, parents-turned-coaches started awarding trophies — entire bedrooms full — to all those who compete. Today everyone gets celebrated, in part to put an end to the common cruelties of life that so many of us grew up with.
[Yaddah yaddah yaddah. Ask Emily Dickinson about twisting in your own angst. Talk to Walt Whitman about self-absorption. Ask Henry David Thoreau why his mother brought him groceries while he dove into his naval on Walden pond. Don't you just wish they'd have never done it? That they'd just shut up and gotten a life?
What's so different about people now? The publication? Emily Dickinson said "Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man." She wanted her sister to burn all those poems, AFTER SHE DIED. That sure didn't stop her from sewing them up in little booklets and sending them around to all her friends in her avid letter-writing.
Oh, and those Victorians? Kept these amazing diaries and commonplace books. They wrote about and engaged their lives in a way our passive TV generation never had enough self-reflexivity to approach. So the Victorian epistolary tradition is being reborn online. So the commonplace books return, in a different form. And yes, the audiences for many of these is quite small, maybe even as small as the number of people Emily sent all her poems around to, many she never met in person, despite her voluminous correspondence.]
Now the obligatory confession: in an irony of life that I've not yet fully reconciled myself to, I write a daily blog full of intimate details about one of the oldest broadcasts on television. While the media landscape of my youth, with its three television networks, now seems like forced national viewing by comparison, and while I anchor a broadcast that is routinely viewed by an audience of 10 million or more, it's nothing like it used to be. We work every bit as hard as our television-news forebears did at gathering, writing and presenting the day's news but to a smaller audience, from which many have been lured away by a dazzling array of choices and the chance to make their own news.
[If you want to try to wrap your head around the differences in kind between that old media experience and this new media experience, look at how Josh Kucera wrestles with it here.]
[...]
Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we're all talking at once? What if "talking" means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention? The whole notion of "media" is now much more democratic, but what will the effect be on democracy?
The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge ... because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart.
Williams is anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News
From the Dec. 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine
Yo Brian! Is this such a BAD thing?
I CELEBRATE myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.[...]
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