As consumers assert more control over media and messaging, it seems like an important POV.
This is from June 15th's NY Times OpEd page and written by Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff:
The Interactive Truth
It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it's the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.
More than 60 percent of the American people don't trust the press. Why should they? They've been reading "The Da Vinci Code" and marveling at its historical insights. I have nothing against a fine thriller, especially one that claims the highest of literary honors: it's a movie on the page. But "The Da Vinci Code" is not a work of nonfiction. If one more person talks to me about Dan Brown's crackerjack research I'm shooting on sight.
The novel's success does point up something critical. We're happier to swallow a half-baked Renaissance religious conspiracy theory than to examine the historical fiction we're living (and dying for) today. And not only is it remarkably easy to believe what we want to believe. It's remarkably easy to find someone who will back us up. Twenty-five years ago George W. S. Trow meditated on this in "Within the Context of No Context." Then it indeed appeared that authority and orthodoxy were wilting in the glare of television. Have we exterminated reason in the meantime?
If you are 6 years old and both your parents read one online, you can be forgiven for not knowing what a newspaper is. You would also be on to something. The news has slipped its moorings. It is no longer held captive by two-inch columns of type or a sonorous 6 p.m. baritone. It has gone on the lam. Anyone can be a reporter - or a book reviewer, TV star, museum guide, podcaster or pundit.
This week The Los Angeles Times announced its intention to exile the square and stodgy voice of authority farther yet. The paper will launch an interactive editorial page. "We'll have some editorials where you can go online and edit an editorial to your satisfaction," the page's editor says. "It's the ultimate in reader participation," explains his boss, Michael Kinsley. Let's hope the interactive editorial will lead directly to the interactive tax return. On the other hand, I hope we might stop short before we get to structural engineering and brain surgery. Some of us like our truth the way we like our martinis: dry and straight up.
This seems like yet another example of people embracing an open source mindset. I am currently reading Alex Wipperfurth's "brand hijack". A kind of manifesto which encourages marketers to let go of controlling urges and co-create content with their customers. Seems like the interactive editorial thing in this article does just that.
My favorite line from Wipperfurth's manifesto seems apropos here:
"Resist the paranoid urge for consistency. Embrace the value of being surprising and imperfect"
Posted by: Simon Pearce | June 15, 2005 at 03:31 PM