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.'"

I'd do it.

[AltGrendel]

If I could write.

And if they could read.

Stephen Glass

[GMontag]

It seems like it is about time for another Stephen Glass incident in the Tech articles. The journalsts graduating now were pre-highschool (I think) when the last big one happened.

A word to the wise

[Black Parrot]

> Pitchfork has an article on how being unable to write about technology has dumbed-down the media.

Now consider whether they can write about other topics, where you happen to be less capable of spotting any flaws.

Ignorance = cool

[Gothmolly]

It's a US cultural thing, look how geeks are reviled & marginalized. People expect technology to just work, with no effort on their part, and any failure in the execution of technology MUST be on the part of the technologist or the tool, never the user. People have been taught for the last 40 years that causality is just a conceit, that logic is optional, that feeling good about yourself is better than getting good grades, that fashion trumps form, and basically that brains are for losers. The able must serve the unable in our culture, so where's the benefit to being one of the able?

My only consolation is that your children will reap the world that you've built for them long after I'm worm-food.

Re:Ignorance = cool

[Opportunist]

The benefit of having a brain becomes obvious when you see on which side of the counter you're standing at when the phrase "do you wanna have fries with this" is uttered.

My consolation is that I will be the one saying "no thank you", not "ok, sir".

Is it a technology story indeed?

[Trurl's Machine]

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.

It's out there.

[Rob T Firefly]

Unfortunately, the only place you'll see this kind of writing these days are sources seen as fringe by the mainstream. You could either distill the .005% of blogs with so-called journalistic value, or you could follow things like Indymedia, [indymedia.org] or to a much lesser degree the bland-by-consensus Wikinews. [wikinews.org]

The only reason Hunter got published at all in his day was he sold media. Then as now, the elderly media corporations aren't taking any editorial interest in what they print beyond how many papers/ads/commercials it'd sell. In Hunter's day there was the old Rolling Stone magazine (not yet a totally hideous corporate parody of itself) which ate his work up as long as it sold well to its target audience of hippies, armchair revolutionaries, and other stoned people.

Unfortunately, the things that sell the most homogenized corporate papers and magazines these days usually mention "Brangelina" picking something out of their teeth or Britney Spears drop-kicking another baby while driving. Average Joe Sixpack doesn't want to be bothered with anything more than whether his favorite useless overpaid sports team won, who his favorite useless overpaid movie stars are getting it on with, and possibly a feel-good local piece about Granny Gums Magillicuddy who turns 103 years young this week and swears it's all thanks to a lifelong diet of yogurt and aquarium gravel.

This could well shift as more people turn to the customizable, user-publishable news sources on the Internet, but the old school are not going to leave quietly. One result of this is newspapers' web sites renaming their columnists' writings to "blogs" and setting up RSS feeds.

Re:Ignorance = cool

[Oligonicella]

Geeks are not reviled and marginalized by society. They do it to themselves, then whine about how all the other members don't respect their superiority.

Just look at the commentary here at /.; where geeks spout about things of which they have absolutely no clue as to the facts, presented with grammar and logic becoming a five year old and yet pontificate as if they are just as accurate as they are talking about the innards of some router.

Don't see his point

[SimDarth]

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.

Re:Is it a technology story indeed?

[kin_korn_karn]

There's no gonzo today because people aren't interested in culture. Why? The media isn't. People get their view of the world from the media and if the media doesn't present cultural nuances as an option people aren't going to know it's there, at least not in numbers significant enough to revive interest in it.

Extrapolation.

[Jerk City Troll]

Whenever I see journalists talking about technology, I notice that most of the time they are completely wrong or way off the mark. When I think about it, I cannot recall any instance of mainstream media getting a technology story right. Whether it is ignorance or an overwhelming need to sensationalize, I do not know. But that is besides the point.

If they are getting all of this stuff wrong, what are they getting wrong about topics in which I am not well-versed? Could it be that everything they are reporting is as erroneous and confused yet we take it at face value because we know little about the subject matter? I think that if you find reporting on technology to be crap, you should be a little concerned about everything else you read and hear on the news. But then, you should be sceptical regardless.

Re:More like we don't know how to read tech...

[AndersOSU]

I don't think it is impossible for a significant portion of the population to understand tech, I don't think that it is impossible for any one to understand anything. I think you are perpetuating the real problem with the media today - they think everyone is an idiot.

Because the media caters to the lowest common denominator no on really thinks they need to learn anything, because after all, CNN can package stories about net neutrality in 2 minute segments. I personally believe that a lot of the "masses" are more than capable of understanding the issues, we just need someone to raise the bar.

I don't think this is unique to tech either. I think we see the same problem in politics, i.e. wiretaps, and DMCA. Rather than explain the real issues, have two talking heads barking at each other. It just so happens that this gets really ugly when technology and politics merge.

All these failings come down to one thing - money. Let's face it news is big buisness, and journalism has known for a long time that sensationalism sells papers - they, by and large, just haven't managed to preserve the noblility of their profession while selling papers. And as a result we're suffering, and the average American is more poorly informed, they're suffering, and newspaper subscriptions are falling and news segments get squeezed out for human interest, or entertainment news.

But hey, the politicians love it. Instead of debating on the merits of, say NASA funding, they get to preach about flag burning and gay marrige.

He's so wrong.

[gorehog]

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.

Re:Gonzo == crap

[-cman-]

Gonzo is not crap. Gonzo and New Journalism [wikipedia.org] 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 [counterpunch.org].

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 [crooksandliars.com]. 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.

Re:I disagree: The changes just come too fast

[Daniel Dvorkin]

For a whole decade, teenagers wanted music that was, essentially, unchanged for the whole decade.

No.

Top 40 hits for:
1960 [cylist.com]
1965 [cylist.com]
1969 [cylist.com]

Distance in time reduces our level of resolution just as surely as distance in space; we tend to think of recent decades as homogeneous chunks of time (and, if we go back a century or so, we think of centuries the same way; go back further, and it's millennia.) But they are not homogeneous at all to the people living in them. In the case of 1960's music, what made it an exciting time for music journalism was that it was changing so fast.

Re:Gonzo == crap

[hackstraw]

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.

I can't find a cite right now, but a coworker and I were talking some time back and he said that he read somewhere that people that got their political news from The Daily Show were more informed than those who got their "journalism" from mainstream media.

What is special about technology?

[itsdapead]

This seems to assume that journalism on non-technology subjects is wonderful and, e.g:

• Rarely makes mistakes, or simplifies a subject to the point of inaccuracy
• Values in-depth discussion over sound-bites
• Is concerned with facts and evidence, rather than rhetoric and opinion
• Seeks genuine debate and inquiry rather than encouraging conflict and mudslinging
• Asks interviewees sensible questions that they can be reasonably expected to answer clearly, and avoids accusatory or leading questions
• Is more interested in informing the electorate than nailing ministerial scalps to the mantlepiece
• Waits until the rubble has stopped rolling before broadcasting the number of casualties

If you want to see the same standards in technology reporting as (e.g.) the reporting of politics then get An Industry Leader and An Open Source Guy in a studio, ask Indurstry Leader whether throwing furniture is a good management tactic and ask Open Source Guy when he is going to stop encouraging people to illegally copy software. It'll be lively, and do wonders for ratings, but nobody will learn much and technology experts will learn how to avoid answering questions.

Re:We already have a Bangs and a Thompson

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

And Cringely.

John Dvorak and Robert Cringely. I don't think we need any more tech-Gonzos.

Gonzo is gone

[Sqreater]

It's just not possible anymore. I've been an adult in the pre-internet, pre-tech-explosion world and the post. And I'll tell you this: that world is gone, never to return. The outsider who has an overview is a thing of the past. The massive communications and tech explosion that started in the 70s and accelerated thereafter every year has added so many layers to the onion of life that no one can possibly pull it all together, even in the superficial sense of clever and entertaining social commentary. He won't understand enough to do so, and the audience is so fragmented now that he would be unintelligible to most if he could. The burden of knowledge needed to be "in the know," or "in on the joke" is just too great. In a world in which generationalism is dead due to the many different choices that can be made withing a group of people of the same age, how can you say any generally understandable truth about society or technology? Does such a thing exist any longer? I don't think so. Your truth and insight is not mine is not his. We live on our couple of thin layers of the onion of life now and feel fortunate if we can reasonably understand those.

Don't continue to look for some journalistic messiah to pop up to "make sense" of it all.

Re:More like we don't know how to read tech...

[suffe]

I couldn't agree more. I'd go as far as to say it should be easier to write about hings that people don't know everything these days. I have as much hubris as the next guy, probably even more, but I'm more then willing to admit that I do not know everything. Does this make an article less worth reading? No, just the opposite! If you stumble across something you do not understand then head over to google, wikipedia or your other favourite place-of-all-mankinds-knowledge. Read up on things, gain a better understanding and then read the article again. People need to start realising that YOU CAN LEARN NEW THINGS.

This stupid status quo of knowlege needs to be booted out with other ingorant views.

Re:I was Gonzo and I still am.

[Hosiah]

Jesus H. Christ! If a zombie ate your brain, it must have died of malnutrition! Look, gonzo-style journalism is nowhere near anything you're describing. Gonzo writing style has but one qualification over merely very good vanilla writing: BALLS. Big, sweaty, meaty, hairy, jocky balls. Think of Macho Man Randy Savage. Now think of him with an IQ of 250 and a couple PhD's under his belt, pounding a keyboard under the influence of nothing stiffer than an espresso to make sure he stays randy. That's gonzo. "If you have to ask, you'll never know!"

Re:I write Gonzo Journalism

[Hosiah]

You do not have to be on drugs. You do not have to be insane. You have to be a hell of a lot smarter than average to pull it off, substance abuse and insanity is then optional. You do not have to be on drugs. You do not have to be insane. You have to be a hell of a lot smarter than average to pull it off, substance abuse and insanity is then optional. How many times do I have to fucking say it? Show me the definition where it says, "You must be THIS HIGH to write gonzo style."?