In slightly expanded context, from Ring Lardner:
“Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
“Shut up he explained.”
It seemed reasonable to wait for the blogs to calm, and then some. It took nearly two weeks, an eternity on the Ether. The topic is what was meant by the Tuesday offering of Los Angeles Times humor columnist Joel Stein (there may be a required but free registration). Its headline was “Have something to say? I don’t care” and secondary hed was “Don’t bother sending anything to that e-mail address below — because I don’t care.” The piece stays precisely on that subject and with that same attitude. That made it tough, especially for people too young to read, as they were published, the likes of Lardner, Mencken, Benchley or Buchwald, even though the last was writing about Bush and Rumsfeld until days before he died this week. Stein wrote a hilarious column, with gorgeous structure, parallel rhetoric and successive punchlines in the brisk manner of cable TV stand-up comedy. Can’t expect a talent like Stein to get printed up today using the pace of Ring, Hank, Bob or Art.
I howl on each rereading. As satire from a prominent publication, I have to trust Stein knows hold to wield his scalpel and that I understand him. As such, I believe a number of his essay’s critics are clueless. Or maybe they’re just faking it.
Stein decries the pretense of conversation among Internet publications from diminutive blogs like mine to latimes.com. Or let’s call it dialogue. No, interaction. Stein labels it “false easy community.” Is he joking, or is angry? Here are relatively straight sentences cut from among Stein’s retorts:
Here’s what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. … Does Philip Roth have to put his e-mail at the end of his book? Does Tom Hanks have to hold up a sign with his e-mail at the end of his movie? … Not everything should be interactive. A piece of work that stands on its own, without explanation or defense, takes on its own power. If Martin Luther put his 95 Theses on the wall and then all the townsfolk sent him their comments, and he had to write back to all of them and clarify what he meant, some of the theses would have gotten all watered down. … There is no practical reason to send your rants to me. If you want to counter my opinion publicly, write a letter to the editor. If you want me fired, write a letter to the publisher. … A lot of e-mail screeds argue that, in return for the privilege of broadcasting my opinion, I have the responsibility to listen to you. I don’t. No more than you have a responsibility to read me.”
Web sites are not democratically interactive. They’re administered; the owner lets you write. Even if the comments are unmonitored the owner can pull the plug. Blogs are not interactive; comments by definition are reactive. You want to talk, do e-mail or instant-message. Pick up the phone.
Conversation is what Stein said he wishes to avoid. But it’s only a certain kind of dialogue he finds pointless. His style sounds like Bill Maher’s shtick, and Maher writes out his sometimes for Web sites. What blog proponents call interfacing, a comic like Maher would call heckling.
Newspaper Web sites get very confusing when they faddishly make available and encourage online commenting. They’re not necessarily fair and open — just like call-ins and letters to the editor, the same folks write and write and write some more. The feedback in the same window or page also makes necessarily complex sites harder to course through.
A serious publication such as a newspaper seeks to inform and to entertain. A call-in TV or radio show seeks input from viewers or listeners to drive the program. They are not the same, though chat fans seem to holler otherwise.
Stein is right when he says he writes and we read. And main stream media cannot last if they do not pay attention to their readers’ reactions.
Online readers generally go to a news Web site for information, analysis and entertainment. Most do not head there to see what the frequent posters have to say about immigration yet again.
Some have the assumption that people who get information off the ‘Net have lots of time to browse. Maybe you do. -30-
