the Derek Thomson Ezra Klein culture industry
Listening to Derek Thompson's "Everything is Television" ep - certainly some points, if mostly thanks to Raymond Williams, but gives short shrift to the "flow" of radio (which also gave us shifts of dj's after it gave us serial programming ....), and to the more disciplined, program-based family tv viewing that many grew up with at a time when, thanks especially to the heyday of cable tv, the "flow" was accelerating.
But there's a couple of jokes -- at one point, DT or someone says hey it's a podcast, we're all dilettantes, and that term is repeated. Then there's a joke from the opposite end, 'Derek, is it possible you and Ezra Klein are the smartest human beings ever born.' Derek does lots of blushes at the breadth of his work, but then tells a mildly revolting parable of how he's been right to be interested in so many topics, is ADHD anyway, and has a "theory of everything" which suggests, of all things, that all topics in human life are overlapping and interconnected. Well done.Â
Esp when measured against more old school models of journalism, Derek Thompson is sometimes little more than the mirror of Joe Rogan, a very smart 'everything' guy with great guests and commentary attractive to his demographics (by the way, in this podcast ep, listen to how hard it is to tell who is speaking -- speaking style of Derek and guests/hosts [it's a podcast of a podcast, popular now] as well as bizarrely similar pitch and timbre). In other words, he's a breed of journalist who in past times would have been relegated to pundit or else "essayist" of the E. B. White or Joan Didion variety (or the Gore Vidal variety, and Vidal's example is mentioned). But now, the brainiest people in the word seem to turn to DT and EK, as to Rogan and Piker (let alone others ...), for the dirt on everything under the sun, rather than continue to peruse, specialty by specialty, the output of academia, and instead of turning to journalism mostly for -- of all things -- reporting! Such reporting has changed and diminished a lot too, and has its own entanglements with social media etc, but the old school practitioners still limit their op eds or podcasts, surely in part for reasons of quality control and humility. However skilled, they will never have the public profile of the Thompson-Klein type, and of course I say, good on you.
Academics are always fundamentally "longer-form" than journalists, and always more specialized, even than beat reporters of old. They are clearly passing away quickly in a culture where people seem to read less by the month, and so universities are in crisis, and podcast/media-driven outlets are booming, even reviving (NYT to Free Press to CBS!).
It's the feeling I had even in 2006, teaching college, when I first realized a student could turn up a fact about Chaucer on wikipedia that I had never even heard, and which was likely accurate. And now, how can academic knowledge production compete with Thompson-Klein-Rogan-Piker theories of everything? Except that anyone who remembers a solid tertiary education before 2010 realizes that it's mostly old vodka in new bottles, a baldfaced recycling of intellectual work done years ago, which a few new bits of science, tech, and sociology painted on.
Back in the late nineties, in grad school, I remember people occasionally putting me onto a few "outlaw philosopher" types - no real academic credentials, dropped out to do the 'real thing,' internet following, etc -- and when I read them, I would stop after 500 words and be like, oh, this is Hegel; or this is Wittgenstein, or Plato or Schopenhauer. And not really the top shelf stuff. They weren't folding this in on the sly either, trying to get famous and hoping no one would notice the 'plagiaristic' aspects. They simply didn't know. Because they hadn't read, they had dropped out to reinvent the wheel, and in philosophical registers, they sounded like children discovering surface tension on a pond full of insects, or the relationship between shadows and light sources with a flashlight -- essential, and wonderful, but in children. In adults, hubristic, oblivious, developmentally arrested trains on a track to nowhere, except perhaps a following among people who were keen to be enlightened through one or two websites only (companions of those spiritual seekers who attached themselves to western-style Buddhism precisely because it asked nothing of them that they were not already keen to give, and then only as practical). Now, these people are everywhere emboldened by the short form video universe DT talks about, and by its accompanying breed of everything men (all men, btw), from Trump to Thompson. We've seen for along time that hard news has not been giving way to punditry and public intellectualism so much as actually transforming into these -- DT and his sort read Propublica and the NYer (which itself sins also, of course), but then they spin that reportage into almost an academic credential, a phd in everything that comes up ....
Thompson and Klein are also both fond of blunting the stigma of AI by talking frankly, or appearing to, about how they use it. And minus the personality (for the moment), AI is now technology's everything-podcast man.
