I'd like to take credit for accumulating what seems to be the right
amount of experience in the right areas leading up to where I am today.
That wouldn't give credit to the large slice of luck I have had along
the way, help from friends, and the respect I have been granted over
the years by those with whom I have worked.
Frankly speaking, I have enjoyed the collaborations, whether in gathering
the right sources to break a story on deadline at the Savannah Morning
News, or working with an art director to put the prefect bon mot
to a print ad. Working with individuals who enjoy their craft as much
as I do has always been a bonus. That most shared my overriding interest
in the accomplishment over the parsing out of credit has been a joy.
In recent years, I have found web work to be more solitary. (That
is, with the exception of Orion
-- a singularly non-solitary exploit.) In addition to my web work, academics
have become central to my life, and I can underscore that laboring in
those vineyards is indeed lonely work. I have hopes that the opportunities
to work with others in academia will increase in the future. It's an
odd thing, you know, that by the time you finish working on the degree,
you find that you've so narrowly crafted your interests that nearly
no one else is the least interested in them. (And who can blame them.)
Finally, a more somber key. I've noted over the past 23 years of being
paid to write, that the craft has fallen, it seems, in value. I first
noticed this in advertising copy. No one wanted those wonderfully Ogilvy-estque
stories. They didn't even want a Bernbach phrase. Bullet points! Given
they were paying exactly the same per project, it was easy to accept
this. But I miss telling a story.
This especially in the case of web work: the pretty pictures and dazzling
tricks at times seem to overwhelm the content. We live in a world that
pays lip service to valued information (a.k.a., knowledge), rarely slowing
down long enough to read it. At times, I have been guilty of this myself,
rushing from reading one bit of e-mail to updating a webpage to taking
care of some other seemingly very important task.
Combine this frenetic thrashing about with the instantaneous quality
of the net, and you have, I think, a sort of cultural blender cum temporal
morph, capable of both quickly reducing anything substantial to an "easy-to-drink
meal" that can be changed at a moment's notice. That is, we are placing
so much emphasis on the web as a source of knowledge, but failing to
note that the web contains no permanent history, no lasting record,
and that it's only people who create knowledge. Editions are ephemeral.
Publishing is at once easy, democratic and valueless.
Should we be surprised then, that some netizens fail to appreciate
the value of putting time and effort into a thing when that thing can
always be modified or deleted at a click of a button? This is the same
logic that eliminated the need for basic math on the grounds that handheld
calculators would always be available to manage such mundane functions,
such as thinking.
The situation reminds me of the undergraduate who handed his professor
a list of books the undergraduate had checked out of the library, as
if it offered proof that the books had been read. I hope that after
we've all gotten over the cute coding and irritating animations, we
could return to a concern for content, and with it, a concern for writing
and reading. That is, Mass Communications.
My Life in Journalism
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Copyright 1999 Thomas Gould
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