The News of Mass Media’s Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

The story goes like this. Mark Twain was reading the paper one morning, smoking a cigar and running his fingers through that nappy white afro. When he reached the obituary section, he saw his picture. Immediately, he picked up the phone and called the editor to say, “Sir, the news of my demise has been greatly exaggerated.”

In a racy little commentary over at MediaPost, George Simpson has a few words to say about the brewing war between social media and mass media. 

Simpson’s primary critique of mass media is its tendency to speak to the lowest common denominator—”the 8th grade intellectual level.” Ironically, he baits readers with a title that would make mass media sludge kings proud: You Can Lead a Whore-to-Culture, But…

I always experience spikes in readership when I include words like “whore” in the title. Or breasts. But then, I loved 8th grade. 

At the end of the article, George Simpson mentions Shakespeare. And that prompted me to take a few minutes and post here. I’ve been thinking a lot about Shakespeare lately because my wife and I are performing in A Mid Summer Night’s Dream in a few weeks. (She’s Titania the Fairy Queen. I’m Theseus the CEO.) If you haven’t read that play in awhile, you might be surprised at its “8th grade intellectual level.” Of course, we don’t feel that way. I needed a Masters degree before I could read the dirty jokes hidden inside that Elizabethan English.

The Elizabethan’s were already masters of Elizabethan English. To them, the jokes were just dirty. It was humor on the ”8th grade intellectual level” and they loved it. Shakespeare was arguably the first mass media mogul working in the English language.

He was the Steven Spielberg of his day.

Although the bard’s mass media was appreciated in his lifetime, even Shakespeare seems to have felt like he was dismissed as a hack artist. Before Schindler’s List, Spielberg probably felt a little dismissed too.

The standards for artistic excellence were different in Shakespeare’s day. He couldn’t just switch genres to earn an Oscar. The entire form of drama had not yet been legitimized. The real literary artists were poets. Shakespeare probably wanted to be like Sir Philip Sidney whose sonnet sequence was considered a masterpiece in its own day (and still is). Perhaps, that is why the bard turned poet to write a sonnet sequence that never reaches the beauty and transcendence of his plays. He even wrote Venus and Adonis, a wonderful love poem that gave him more legitimacy as a writer. He needed something epic like Chaucer or Dante. Venus and Adonis is hardly epic, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Shakespeare’s poetry stinks and his plays are magnificent. But I find it a little odd that he needed to pursue poetry at all to demonstrate that he was a serious literary artist. In the end, he is much more prolific in the medium of poetic drama than the medium of poetry. I suppose he resigned himself to continue writing his pop culture mass media plays about fairies and current events and some guy from Denmark.

It’s so easy to recognize the success of other people. Especially when we can view their entire lives through the lens of a simplified biography. We focus on the fleeting moments of success and ignore the years of struggle and day-to-day living.

I will say this about mass media. It forces us into a scarcity mindset. (I won’t mention any books by Chris Anderson.) Mass media functions on hits. Blockbuster movies keep the studio alive. Best sellers keep the publisher in business.

 For the first time in a long time, social media sets us free from this mindset.

Finally, we are back to the world of Sir Philip Sidney. Remember his sonnet sequence? He published that to personal friends and acquaintances by passing around hand written manuscripts. (He paid a scribe to write them out, I’m sure.)

He wrote to a very specific audience and published to that audience alone.

In fact, the mass publication of Shakespeare’s scripts a few decades later were seen as almost scandalous. No doubt, art is an intimate window into writer’s soul. Some Elizabethans thought it was a kind of prostitution for writers to let anyone look into their soul for the cost of the cheap quarto or even the First Folio.

What does this have to do with social media? In a sense, social media is even cheaper than mass media. At least mass media profits from its prostitution. Bloggers just give it away and bare it all like some… Well, you just take that metaphor wherever you think it should go.

But see blogs and social media aren’t really literary versions of free tricks. With 15 million or so active blogs in America alone, we can keep our small community of readers even though our content is fully available to the public. We get lost in the abundance of the net, and so we are able to hand select our audience just like Sir Philip Sidney.

Of course, Sidney’s manuscript could fall into hands for which it was never intended. Our articles on these self-published websites can too. But that isn’t a bad thing. And since we have escaped the economic scarcity of Mass Media, we don’t even write with the intention of producing hits.

At least I don’t. The success of my writing isn’t the number of people it reaches. It’s the depth to which it reaches the people I love. You know who you are.

And I have a big gift for you tomorrow.

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Image of Mark Twain and Dorothy Quick is in the public domain, available through Wikimedia Commons.