The Trouble with Old Perspectives on New Media
I don't ask enough of the things I see online. I have this bizarre compulsion once I start reading something to also finish reading it, and generally things have to be pretty terrible to drive me off during the read, even if when I arrive at the end of it I can't help but think "wow, that was awful."
I think it's a holdover from spending a considerable amount of my childhood on older forms of media; generally, if one sticks to a story one can't get into or a newspaper article that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, it will either pick up or you will at least learn something you need to know. The difference between the two is that there is a much higher overhead cost in physical print media, so the material that goes to print has already had to meet a higher quality threshold. In new media, any idiot with a computer and five dollars a month can start up a blog or a web comic with worldwide distribution.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of blogging and web comics in general. The cream of both crops is, in my opinion, at worst equal to the best competing printed forms. Often it's material that would have been witheld from print not because of quality, but because of an increasingly unimaginative or image-motivated set of gatekeepers. In that way, it's a blessing. But on the other hand, since there is no longer a filter between the content creation and distribution, you have to filter it out yourself. There are entire social-filtering toolsets for solving this problem (e.g. Digg or StumbleUpon), and the web phenomenon of "going viral" has arisen from the naturally occuring social filter of passing links via blogs or IM; but those focus more on discovery than on keeping one from getting sucked into plodding through the bloody awful dregs of the internet because of one's sheer ingrained compulsion to stick with the text.
Oddly enough, sticktoitiveness and determination to finish what I've started have both been in short supply for me lately; possibly this is because I'm wasting all of it pointlessly plodding through horrible things on the intarwebs. I definitely need to start dropping things that don't prove worthwhile after the first couple of strips or paragraphs.
I think it's a holdover from spending a considerable amount of my childhood on older forms of media; generally, if one sticks to a story one can't get into or a newspaper article that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, it will either pick up or you will at least learn something you need to know. The difference between the two is that there is a much higher overhead cost in physical print media, so the material that goes to print has already had to meet a higher quality threshold. In new media, any idiot with a computer and five dollars a month can start up a blog or a web comic with worldwide distribution.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of blogging and web comics in general. The cream of both crops is, in my opinion, at worst equal to the best competing printed forms. Often it's material that would have been witheld from print not because of quality, but because of an increasingly unimaginative or image-motivated set of gatekeepers. In that way, it's a blessing. But on the other hand, since there is no longer a filter between the content creation and distribution, you have to filter it out yourself. There are entire social-filtering toolsets for solving this problem (e.g. Digg or StumbleUpon), and the web phenomenon of "going viral" has arisen from the naturally occuring social filter of passing links via blogs or IM; but those focus more on discovery than on keeping one from getting sucked into plodding through the bloody awful dregs of the internet because of one's sheer ingrained compulsion to stick with the text.
Oddly enough, sticktoitiveness and determination to finish what I've started have both been in short supply for me lately; possibly this is because I'm wasting all of it pointlessly plodding through horrible things on the intarwebs. I definitely need to start dropping things that don't prove worthwhile after the first couple of strips or paragraphs.