In his November 18th essay “Weakness and Endurance,” New York Times columnist David Brooks uses the example of Newsweek’s shaky revival as an opportunity to praise the intellectual value of old general-interest magazines. He also bemoans that “general” has since devolved into banal.
While I can easily agree with Mr. Brooks’s valuing of intellectual curiosity and high-minded dialog, I can scarcely comprehend the particular justification that he provides for them, except perhaps as an advanced case of old white man’s myopia.
Rather than reading the actual developments, values and interests of modern American culture, he is prosthelytizing a bygone era of erudite intellectualism that — while not without its merits – simply doesn’t exist, perhaps never did, and likely never should have.
And remember, we’re talking about Newsweek here, not the The Atlantic or The New Yorker. Those magazines (and many others such as Vanity Fair, Harpers and Texas Monthly) still exist and are relatively healthy in a difficult media environment.
Oh, and if you want a thoughtful, well-reported general interest magazine, you can also buy The Economist, which is thriving in the U.S. While technically a “British” publication, The Economist has the most readers in the US and gives a lot of attention to this region.
But as an international publication, it also provides very deep coverage of other regions, with entire, regular sections dedicated to Latin America, Asia, and Africa (as well as Europe).
This goes well beyond the occasional, cursory views of regions outside the US that Time-Newsweek provide(d) – generally only when there is the spectacle of political, natural or military catastrophe.
Most embarrassing for him, Brooks’s only nod to the online media is an offhand remark about the “deluge of vapid social network chatter.” Sure, lots of it is vapid. But social networks are more than publishing venues. They are also digital water coolers. And water cooler chat has always been vapid.
Social networks also allow people to learn far more about the world than they could in the old days. Now, you aren’t just dependent on what Newsweek or the New York Times (or The New Yorker) hands down, you can also hear from dozens of generally thoughtful people — including, yes, bloggers.
A case in point: While staple men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire have lost touch with the real state of life for men in favor of glitzy images of megarich, hypersexed superstars that most men can never be, startup publications like The Good Men Project and The Art of Manliness are hosting a thoughtful discussion about how to make real men’s lives better through psychological growth and, yes, cultural refinement. For example, one such blog recently published a multi-part primer series on major eras of art history.
(And having worked at national print publications, I’ve seen how the endless editing can reduce a once-coherent and thought-provoking piece into drivel. Spontaneous publishing online, while perhaps not as polished, can be a lot more insightful.)
In social media, you also get breaking news from the people who know it best, long before journalists can even get in to start understanding it. Without Twitter, it would have taken us much longer to find out far less about the Haitian earthquake. And without Twitter and Facebook, we would never know most of what happened after the last Iranian elections.
News also thrives in social networks because you are exposed to ideas from friends, as well as friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. And with Twitter, you can follow any people you admire, not only those you know.
This can expose you to a far wider range of perspectives than your weekly magazine or paper. And while many of these posts do reference old-media like The New York Times, they also offer far more information — for example, quotes from lesser known news outlets, or institutes such as the Pew Research Center.
Social networks also publish breaking news directly from the fingers of the artists, scientist, politicians and CEOs who are making it, as well as behind-the-scenes perspectives from journalists like Mr. Brooks’s colleagues at the New York Times. (Brooks might try following David Carr or Nick Bilton to learn about this.)
It is true, as Brooks writes that “Technology accelerated everything.” But not the intellectual decline that he imagines.
Brooks’s discussion also appears to leave out the vast majority of the world that isn’t white and/or American. He praises historical coverage of John Foster Dulles and Georgia O’Keeffe, who were certainly worthy of it. But so are Dawn Aung San Su Kui and Gilberto Gill.
Not that magazines like Newsweek don’t cover these people. But why does Brooks leave out such examples when describing the “common culture that all educated Americans should study and know.”
In fact, America is multicultural and growing more so all the time. It’s not all bad that “The media segmented as each lifestyle niche got its own treatment.” In the old days, many of those niches got no treatment at all. (There were, in fact, gay people in the 1940s, as well as Latinos and American Muslims. But you’d have a hard time learning about them.)
Through the very social media that Brooks disdains, news from these niche cultures comes to our attention and can make us better rounded individuals than if we relied on a handful of sources.
And what of this “common culture,” that Brooks describes? In a multicultural society, a uniform mindset is an illusion of the privileged class. The only thing “common,” perhaps, is the guilty pleasures of the lowbrow and banal, the “ceaseless ephemera” that Brooks (rightfully) bemoans.
In fact, Mr. Brooks argument represents the epitome of the “niche” culture he disdains. His interests in literature and history and political life are praiseworthy. But they are just a tiny slice of the rich information now available to us in a multicultural, socially networked world.
