Fredrik deBoer on the Culture of Contemporary Media
I cannot overstate the degree to which this mode of existence has colonized the media. I know many people in the media and know of many many more and I literally cannot think of more than 10 people who do not engage with the world in precisely this way. It’s as if there is an industry-wide requirement that you remove your emotion chip and replace it with an addiction to self-satisfied mockery. Go to Twitter. Find a few dozen journalists. Everything they post — everything — will be expressed in this type of artifice. The industry runs on this fuel. And it does corrupt and deform the media’s output, all the time, in a myriad ways. Read the New York Magazine website or Slate or anything ever published under the auspices of Gawker/Gizmodo media. You can’t tell me that the dictate to treat all of human life as a competition to be the most mean and clever doesn’t warp their coverage. And though I’m sure it initially feels energizing, writers become boxed in by the narrow confines of this style. There’s a whole cottage industry of Professionally Unimpressed White Women that, despite the ostensible empowerment, looks to me like just another professional ghetto.