That’s all for The Awl. This week the outlet—not sure whether you’re supposed to call it a “general interest” website or a media blog or?—announced that it plans to close up shop at the end of the month: “For nearly a decade we followed a dream of building a better Internet, and though we did not manage to do that every day we tried very hard and we hope you don’t blame us for how things ultimately turned out.”
The closure was covered heavily—more than I expected even knowing that the site was, at least to a limited degree, the terrain of media insiders. Yes, it was popular in certain New York City circles and cracked jokes according to a certain New York City humor and even had reviews of New York City weather! (“deliberately obtuse and staunchly the opposite of weather prediction.”) But it was swiftly mourned in The New York Times and The New Yorker, these laments popping up almost like pre-written obits for serious cultural cornerstones.
I don’t think these prompt eulogies are out of place, however, even if it’s easy to dismiss them as signs of coastal cliquishness. (Disclaimer: The nice folks at The Awl let me write a couple brief posts for their site.) Instead, the Internet’s writers—at the Times and elsewhere—are discovering that the web is increasingly calcified, without many places to post weird, smart prose. On-line media now operates by the laws of virality and reliable appeal, so literary, existential weather reviews (e.g.) aren’t going to survive.
It’s a real bummer because it all means that the Internet is becoming boring and predictable.
Jia Tolentino analyzed The Awl’s plight through a similar lens: “in 2018, the economics of online publishing are running everyone off the map.” She explains earlier:
Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience, and they tend to publish like-minded writers, who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay. The result is editorial latitude to be obscure and silly and particular, but the finances are increasingly hard to sustain; media consumption is controlled these days by centralized tech platforms—Facebook, Twitter—whose algorithms favor what is viral, newsy, reactionary, easily decontextualized, and of general appeal.
Tolentino’s assessment—the quirky, inquisitive genre of blogs vs. the “newsy, reactionary” genre of social media—reminded me of something that Timothy Burke from Swarthmore wrote earlier this very week about his own Internet writing habits:
It’s not clear to me any longer what good I can contribute as a public diarist. Much of what I think gets thought and expressed by someone else at a quicker pace, in a faster social media platform. More importantly, the value of my observations, whatever that might be, was secured through combining frankness and introspection, through raising rather than brutally disposing of open questions. This more than anything now seems quaintly out of place in social media. I feel as if it takes extreme curation to find pockets of social media commentary given over to skepticism and exploration, through collectively playful or passionate engagement with uncertainty and ambiguity.
Both of these posts draw attention to social media’s ascent and its omnivorous, impatient orientation. On the one hand, it is “decontextualized” and therefore has the potential not just for a “general” but even for a universal appeal. It doesn’t ask us for “introspection”; it blurts out “what’s happening in the world right now,” but unfortunately what’s happening in the world right now is consistently regrettable tweeting.
There’s some serious reckoning to do about on-line media—the ways it’s written, distributed, consumed—and there’s no way to accomplish all that in one way-past-my-bedtime blog post. I don’t mean to sketch a kind of Luddite argument here against Facebook, and I’m maybe just restating some element of that DFW “Inverse Cost and Quality Law” but for writing on the Internet. But one thing that definitely comes to mind, more generally, is the Awl tagline (or supplication or demand): “Be Less Stupid.” To borrow some of Burke’s terminology above, people have got to seek out “exploration” and “frankness” on the web, not just stumble into ICQL-driven, algorithmically rewarded anti-content.
To clarify: I don’t mean more people should have read The Awl. I do mean some people should read some odd duck sites like The Awl. I don’t know, think about using an RSS reader and then read into existence the Internet you want.