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Technology And The Decline of Gonzo Journalism
johnny maelstrom writes "Pitchfork has an article on how being unable to write about technology has dumbed-down the media. It's quite interesting to see that the formulaic writings in the technology media and the assumption that we don't all get it has lead to a stagnant media. They call for the next Bangs or Thompson and a revival of Gonzo.
From the article:
'They [the audience] want a tastemaker, a voice of authority, who can put it all in perspective and knock our heads together with his or her crazy-yet-dead-on arguments.
But I think I've found the answer: We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.'"
It's important that people aren't sure how to interpret stories about technology. You can write an article about AOL hogging bandwidth, and while 20% of your audience scoffs at a lack of detail and your own lack of understanding, 50% of your audience doesn't understand. And rather than studying up or discussing the issue with their friends, like an average reader might do for a political or religious story, they completely lose interest.
I think this has very little to do with not knowing how to write technology, and much more to do with the fact that it is (IMO, provably) impossible to write a tech story that is understandable to even a significant portion of the population.
Maybe we do need a new kind of article, though. Perhaps we can display an article on the web, with a slider on the right, so readers can choose the level of detail and accuracy they're comfortable with. If they slide the indicator toward "troglodyte", then the article replaces certain nouns with aphorisms and factual statements with questionable analogies ("...a series of tubes"). If they slide it toward "industry insider", then all the technical jargon reappears and item names transform into well-known acronyms.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
pop culture today is primarily a technology story
Is it really? I think the problem is that we want it to be. Lester Bangs wrote about rock. Rock would not exist withoug electric guitar, tape recorder and analog amplifier. Could Lester Bangs fix a broken tape recorder? Was he a great critic because he understood how a guitar works? No. He wrote about rock music as a cultural phenomenon, not a technological one. I see crisis in videogame criticism precisely in the fact that there are too many technofetish geeks covering it. We read too many reviews focusing on technical details - what 3D engine was used, how many frames per second you get in given resolution, what are the system requirements etc. We read too few focusing on the storyline, character development or the background information. It's like art criticism focusing only on chemical composition of the paint used by the painter. Ever since Gutenberg, culture ALWAYS was a technology story, but what we need now are critics writing about stories and meanings, not about the 3D engines, pixels and frames per second.
I really don't get his point. He's writing like Hunter S. Thompson was universally accepted and Gonzo journalism was some sort of popular revolt that was loved by all. Afraid to say that it has never been like that. Honestly, can you see the average American in the 60s or 70s clamoring for a copy of Rolling Stone to read Hunter's latest? Gonzo appealed to a certain group and Thompson was seen as the greatest by THAT group. Sure, a lot of people today love good ole Hunter, but most of that is just because he's trendy these days. Sort of like philosophy classes in college... people take them so they can feel educated not because of any REAL interest in dissecting the human condition. There are plenty of good (and an extrememly small number of great) writers out there who cover different aspects of "pop" culture. However, video games are not the same as music or movies... those writers who are great video game writers will not seem like great writers to music or movie critics as they deal with totally seperate subjects. Just like Gonzo would not appeal to the average person of the 60s or 70s.
When Thompson wrote Hell's Angels he went out and learned what the life of the Angels was like and he spent months doing it. Then he spent a long time writing a book that challenged people to open their minds in order to accept what he had to tell them. Why didint Thompson address videogames? I imagine he found the experience of playing Counter Strike to be too sterile and too far removed from the hum,anity of armed conflict.
Imagine...
So finally I've learned all the little tricks to surviving in this hellish desert village and I've just started to rack up some meaningful kills. The avatars of children and adults lay strewn everywhere with the walls painted red from the splatter of bullet impacts. I crouch down in a corner and plant the bomb when I hear a boom and the inevitable HEADSHOT. And it's over...until someone reveals to me that he'd been watching though the eyes of he who slayed me and that I had been cheated. My assailant had been using wallhacks and aimbots, prfire scripts and quick reloading tricks, speed hacks and he'd painted a dot on his monitor. What kind of rat bastard cheats at a kids game I thought? What kind of slimy son-of-a-bitch would stoop so low? I had MONEY riding on this for God's sake!
ok, stop imagining...
hunter Thompson saw nothing there because of the sanitized nature of the game. When you walk away NOTHING is changed. It's why I stopped playing RPG's. If I spent all the time I wasted pretending to blacksmith online ACTUALLY BLACKSMITING I would know HOW TO BE A BLACKSMITH BY NOW.
As for music criticism? Who needs it when I can LISTEN to the album and decide if I like it.
There is no gonzo journalism about games because games do not deserve it. Games are what you do between doing significant things. Where's the gonzo journalism about Monopoly?
And there's ons more thing. You cannot marginalize the far left and still expect to see crazy, status-quo shaking arguments.
Gonzo is not crap. Gonzo and New Journalism were a reaction to by a society under a lot of sress following the more staid 1950's. It was fuelled by the rising tide of drugs, rock, and pop culture, and the subject matter was often those sources of social tension, the war, and famously in Thompson's case, Nixon The Crook.
I think the reason "Gonzo" and New Journalism is so underappreciated today is two-fold. One, there is just no longer any capacity to be shocked by anything. Gonzo at it's best is shocking writing that jolts one out of a staid, or concrete mindset. But what is there left to be shocked about in 2006? I think one could argue pretty persuasively that Steven Colbert does Gonzo Journalism every night on Colbert Report. But Colbert Report is considered satire, not journalism and is largely dismissed by mainstream media. Ditto John Stewart, of course.
The second reason for the depreciation of Gonzo is simply dilution through imitation. There are/were so many HST wannabes (including yours truly) that the style has been run into the ground. Few people know or acknowledge that Wolfe, Thompson, Terry Southern, et. al. were serious writers who worked very dilligently at the craft of writing. It all looks thrown together, but that was artifice. For example, Thompson as a young writer used to spend evenings retyping Hemingway and Fitzgerald so that he could get a feel for the words as they were laid down on the page. Few so-called Gonzo writers today are that serious about their craft.
More's the pity. We could use some good Gonzo writing nowadays. With all the hair-pulling within and without the media and its close observers with regards to whether "objective" journalism and "journalism as usual" serves the purposes of an informed republic, how refreshing would it be to see a serious journal take the wraps off a new writer in the gonzo style willing to rip the status quo a new asshole. Giant bats are optional.
"Being Irish, he possessed an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through brief episodes of joy." -W. B.
'I hate that shit...' he muttered.
Not a man of technology ...
Politics , yes [sex, drugs] . Music, yes [ rock and roll]. Technology - no ..
Not medium for gonzo journalism.
I work for the British national press and, although it saddens me to say it, the last thing journalism needs right now is more people humping the 'gonzo' thing. There are so many kids out there who think that any thing that crawls into their ADD ridden brain is 'gonzo' and therefore worthy of print. Well, it's not. It's just verbal vomit.
In the current media climate, what journalism needs is FACTS backed up by well researched and thought out opinion. Not ten million myspace blogs.
Anyway, that's my 2c.
Cheers
Rob
PS : in my humble opinion, Matt Taibbi [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi] is doing an excellent job are carrying on the beat/gonzo thing.. check out his article in the Stone on Iraq [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/106871 89/fort_apache_iraq/] . It's well researched and well written..
PPS: if this post doesn't deserve a modding up - I don't know what the hell does.. Also, my nickname was chosen years ago - before becoming a journalist. (to stop the trolls calling me a hypocrite ;) )