dashing off blog entries and reading other people’s blog entries and commenting might not take time away from other valuable cultural things you could be doing with your time, and doesn’t imply some kind of loss as well as some kind of gain.
And what we don’t know is ultimately what does that mean for society. My guess is that it probably means we will have fewer Michelangelos rather than more, and a more disposable approach to creativity and works of creativity. That doesn’t even get to some of the broader economic ramifications of having a flood of essentially volunteer-created content that inevitably is going to compete for people’s time with what talented professionals have done in the past.
X: That has to do with another question I wanted to bring up , which has to do with the role of public intellectuals today, and how you choose to express yourself. You’ve written a print book. So in a way, you’ve gone pre-digital. Yet at the same time you blog and your blog is fairly widely read. And being a blogger implies doing a certain amount of that skimming of other people’s ideas—you can’t be a good blogger unless you’re part of that mix and that conversation. So you’re choosing to take part in that yourself. But at the same time you point out in the book that newspaper readership is falling off, newsrooms are having to lay off reporters, so there is a kind of deprofessionalization going on and a lot of talented people winding up doing things that are maybe below their potential. And there is this big question about whether people even buy or read books. How do you sort that all out for yourself, when you’re deciding what medium to choose and how to reach people?
NC: It’s a very good question. To be honest, I struggle with blogging. I do it quite a bit and I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now. I get a fair number of readers. And I enjoy it sometimes and I don’t enjoy it other times. I have to say that personal publishing makes me nervous in many ways. Some bloggers and other new media types can denigrate the institutional apparatus of publishing—editors, fact checkers, proofreaders, designers and so forth. When I blog, I actually miss those people, because I’ve worked in both milieus—I’ve published books and worked at magazines, and I think I have a good idea about how valuable the institutional infrastructure of publishing can be. And I think people who think that these are just “filters” that are getting between me and the real stuff are pretty foolish. So, I do have mixed feelings about my blogging. On the other hand it can be fun and it certainly gives you a way to express things that have been very difficult to express in the past. In particular, to me, blogging is a kind of a critical function. I rarely just publish a blog entry that is about my thoughts independent of anything else. it’s usually in reaction to something I’ve seen somewhere else. And it used to be quite hard to do that. You could write that stuff in a personal diary but there was no real outlet for that kind of day-to-day critical thinking about stuff that flows across your mental path. That’s very interesting and it’s a valuable new medium or writing form.
But I think a book or even a long-form magazine article can do things that really can’t be done in blogs. Particularly books. One of the valuable things about writing a book is that it forces you to go back and read a lot of books. These days you can easily get out of the habit of reading books because there is so much stuff around. What you learn is that books allow people to express very subtle ideas and arguments that take a long time to lay out. And I don’t think you get that in blogs. It would be a very sad thing for me to see not only newspapers but books morph into an online medium, but as some people apparently hope. I think there is a role for traditional long form writing that isn’t open for revision by the multitudes, isn’t open for endless revision even by its own author, but is really a work in and of itself. And if we lose that because everybody wants to spend their time reading blogs, however good those blogs might be, I think we’ve lost a very important thing.
X: I guess I’m part of this movement myself of people who have spent most of their lives in print journalism, finding themselves writing more and more for the Internet and ultimately writing exclusively for the internet. That’s certainly what has happened to me over the past several years. And Xconomy is obviously a blog. It’s not a magazine. The economics of starting a magazine these days are totally prohibitive. It’s kind of interesting to see how careers are shaping up and where people are landing as print publications shrink or go through the economic challenge of dealing with the disappearance of print advertising. You have to figure how you’re going to work as a journalist. You’re someone who has left the world of regular periodical publishing and now you’re writing books and blogging. I ‘m wondering, what do you think is the future of the magazine and the newspaper? You cite some fairly discouraging statistics.
NC: I should preface this by saying the reason I’ve been able to leave traditional journalistic employment and write books and write blogs is because I also have found myself in demand as a speaker about information technology, and that’s where I make my money. I’m in an unusual situation. I think I need to say that. It’s not like I am making enough money to live on just by being a writer; that’s very, very difficult. So I don’t put myself forward as a model for some new economic being who is out there being able to live off a blog.
My guess is that every form will have a different fate. I don’t see things shaping up very well for print newspapers. And this is part of a trend that goes back before the net. Newspaper readership, particularly among young people, is going down fast and there’s no sign that it’s going to stop. My guess is that some papers will survive in some form, but the function of newspapers seems to me to be going online pretty quickly. Print magazines seem to be in a better position simply because when you pick up a magazine and flip through it and look at it, you get an experience that is very hard to replicate online. What gives people pleasure from magazines doesn’t translate all that well online. So I think magazines aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, although I’m sure that they will be reshaped by having to take into account what people are reading online.
With books, what scares me is not so much the form going online—because I’m sure the [Amazon] Kindle and e-books will be adopted by some people—but the content. this again is something that predates the Internet, but when you look at studies of serious literature, readership of that has gone down too, and has gone down pretty fast over the last couple of decades. Really, these changes are generational changes. I’m middle-aged and I’m going to have a foot in both worlds. It’s the people who are being born today, the kindergartners, who are just immersed in the world of the computer—when they get older, that’s when we’re going to see the real changes. How much time are they going to have for serious books? Probably not much.
X: Let’s go back to the computing cloud, and talk specifically about a couple of the big companies that are the information utilities of today. Google obviously figures prominently in the book and in all of our lives today. And going along with their massive presence on the internet, they are actually building these massive computing plants like this one they’re building along the Columbia River in Washington. The parallel between what they are doing and what Edison and Insull did is a really interesting. And there is this trend, as you say, the mirrors the spread of electrical utilities—at first everyone thought that they needed their own mainframes and now it’s turning out that computing is more general and everyone can tap into it like a utility, and specialist organizations are kind of taking over, and Google is clearly one of those. Do you feel like that trend has some ways to go to fully play out? In some ways, we’ve just become aware of it in the last few years, so it probably has 15, 20, maybe 30 years to fully play out.
NC: I think different spheres of computing will be affected at different paces. I think we are going to see continued massive investment in the computing grid. Google is certainly the most visible and has been out in front and has been spending billions and billions. But Microsoft is now scared and is throwing as many billions into it as Google. And there are a lot of other companies—I think we’re seeing IBM beginning to make bigger investment, and lots of smaller companies, like Salesforce.com and Intuit. They’re all realizing that if these software programs are going to be served over the Net and hopefully scaled up to millions of users, it takes a lot of hardware and a lot of electricity. I think that’s the way things are going. So I think we’re going to continue to see this fairly rapid and massive build out of the computing gird. And of course as that happen, similar to what happened wit electricity, it kind of spurs itself. Because inevitably as capacity grows, the price goes down, the capabilities go up, and there is less and less reason over time for
