BLOG.KOBEK.COM: In which technology changes… nothing

In which technology changes… nothing

June 27th, 2007 – by Jarett Kobek

As I’ve mentioned, most of my books are bought in a haphazard fashion, generally at the Hollywood & Western Out of the Closet. The most fascinating thus far has been Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus. Published in ‘73, it’s an insider account of the lives of journalists covering the 1972 election, focused by necessity on the ill-fated McGovern campaign. (Nixon’s strategy was an imperial one; he used the strength of the office to enhance his stature and to highlight the many undeniable flaws of McGovern.) In the run up to the ‘08 election, the book has a OH MY GOD NOTHING EVER CHANGES feel. The players are the same & there’s a looming spectre of a war that can’t be won haunting America. Concerns about the quality of journalism, and its impact on the electorate! Etc! Etc!

Crouse had the bad luck to be the other political reporter for Rolling Stone. Along with the work of Hunter S. Thompson, his campaign coverage in 72 remains the magazine’s high-water mark for writing. (Incidentally, one of the most interesting developments of the last few years has been the current political correspondent, Matt Taibbi.) Thompson’s own brilliant book on the 72 Campaign has overshadowed Crouse’s achievement. The Boys on the Bus is most often referenced as a source book for Thompson’s Crazy! Insane! behavior, which is a shame. There’s a lesson in that for you, somewhere.

Tolling like a bell throughout Crouse’s book, and once again making 2007 feel a lot 1971, is the impact of technology. One section on the advent of cable news could be used nearly verbatim as a description of BLOGGING, YOUTUBE, and the INTERNET. Wild crazy guys on a lawless frontier taking on traditional media! Newspaper circulation declining! Traditional reporting going out the window! (And we shouldn’t forget, either, that 72 was early enough for reporting to still be feeling the shocking impact of plain old network news, the novelity of which is examined at great length by Crouse.)

Technology and its supposed impact have been on my mind– so imagine my surprise when I checked !Journalista! and discovered Mr. Dirk Deppey’s on-going discussion of comics piracy. Deppey’s blog is one of my favorites, but it does have a dark downside: very occassional links to articles about e-books, digital paper and comics going digital! Mostly I ignore them. I try and have the same truce with articles about technology blowing up everything we know that I have with God: if He’s not thinking about me, I’m not going to think about Him. But Deppey’s question about the tipping point has, uh, tipped me over my point, and someone’s gotta say something. And that someone’s gotta be me. I guess.

So, let me state a basic rejoinder to every article about digital paper, about comics disappearing, and about the iPhone delivering babies: shut up. Everything is always going to be the same. I know it’s a depressing thought, but there it is. Nothing, not even newspapers, are going away.

The problem really began with everyone under 50 first noticing the impact of COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY when they threw out their CDs and took up MP3s; ever since, we’ve been on High Red at the Event Horizon. Unfortunately, this model isn’t scalable outside its first occurrence.

MP3s became dominant because CDs and cassettes were terrible, terrible mediums. (At least Vinyl had huge art.) You loved listening to Hendrix, but you didn’t love a CD. They were clunky, hung around, and took up too much space. It was a stupid and overpriced (this fact is not insignificant) way to give people what they wanted. Take, on the other hand, cinema. Chain exhibitors are doing everything they can to destroy the experience and yet people are still going to films. (Ignore the nonsense about the current box office slump; this is market variation which will correct itself.) Despite many fears, the theatre is never going away. The experience can not be replicated by DVD, by torrents, or by legal direct-on-demand cable.

We move to comics. HAS COMICS PIRACY impacted the industry? Absolutely, no question. Have Marvel and DC and even our highly valued indy publishers lost money? Possibly. It depends on what you consider a sale. If I, for instance (and I didn’t) pirated the Kree-Skrull War trade paperback, would that be a lost sale? Marvel, with its vested interest, undoubtedly would argue yes, but in reality, unless I was getting that garbage free, I’d never read it. On the other hand, there obviously are people getting a mainline fix via the new weekly torrents. But would they buy these books if the torrents weren’t available? The question, really, is this: have “mainstream” comics become such a boutique industry that they can survive piracy because the audience only wants the books in a certain way, in a certain format, with non-zombie variant covers? Recent blockbuster sales make me lean towards yes.

But that’s the short term. Eventually the cholesterol in those hearts will harden and the target audience will die. What of the long term impacts? Here, we return to The Boys on the Bus. (Remember it?) 35 years later, what most comes across is the concern of newspaper reporters that network news can do their jobs better, and quicker; and if you look at the quality of most political coverage circa 1969, that’s certainly true. Why read a 500 word article when you can hear Dan Rather say it in 30 seconds? I may be wrong, but I believe that the papers were forced to adapt and adopt new forms of longer, analysis based journalism (at least until the advent of USA TODAY) that buoyed them for several decades. This lasted until the World Wide Web, a medium absolutely perfect for longer, analysis-based journalism. Now what will happens to the papers!??! Do they go away entirely?! Some will, assuredly. Maybe even one or two biggies. But someone’s going to figure out a new way to write and present data that’s better suited in a physical, newsprint format than the web. Listen, I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for like 15 years. Half of the articles are online now, and I still read that damned thing front to back each week. The reason why is simple– it’s less irritating to read a 15,000 word piece over a few days on the toilet than it is to read it in a single, or multiple, viewings on a webpage. Even if it is an article about not thinking making you’re smart.

(This is why e-books are, have been, and will be the great chimera of publishing. I’m sure there are some dope addled freaks who do prefer reading Dickens like this, as opposed to this, but we can’t allow drug addicts to shake our faith in a 500 year+ perfected technology. And I say this as a guy who’s got a website full of PDFs.)

How does this relate to the weird world of comics? I’m willing to accept that in the long term, piracy may mean the death of “mainstream” comics in the pamphlet format, and my god, wouldn’t that be great? If so, it’s because the virtues, so-called, of mainstream comics exist in the Bizarro World of anti-reading. When big, meaningless splash pages of exaggerated musculature and striking B&W graphic design hide the fact that neither Brian Michael Bendis nor Frank Miller can write, then of course it’s going to be pirated– these are objects to look at, not read, and a backlit LCD screen is the perfect medium for such an endeavor. Even the great online success story of web comics is based on having, at most, 6 panels that can be viewed in a glance.

But the long form comic that requires its audience to actually, you know, read is much better suited to the printed page. Even if that form is only 25 pages. Sorry, Scott McCloud, but it’s true. Any other way and it’s too annoying.

Much like me posting 30,000 words about comics piracy.

(P.S. The title of Boys on the Bus got me an attempted gay pick-up on the Red Line. It took me about 3 minutes to realize the guy wasn’t crazy and figure out what was happening. Nice enough guy.)