The Times is Creeping Me Out
Posted on April 17th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Is it appropriate for the New York Times to run short bios of those killed at Virginia Tech, then ask readers to “Share Your Memories of _(Name here)”?
If the Times had some special connection to this campus and/or these students, maybe. But it doesn’tâand as a result, these special sections feel creepy and voyeuristic to me. Like crashing the funeral of someone you don’t even know while other people pour out their grief…all so that the Times can drive blog traffic.
Yuk.
4 Responses
4/17/2007 10:27 pm
Richard,
This is social networking. It’s tied up with blogging, and draws on the same virtues you claim for blogging: it’s instantaneous, lets you put your hair down and be authentic, it’s democratizing, and so on. Why do you think the one is god’s gift and more people should do it, and the other is creepy? Blogging isn’t any more wonderful than this blogsploitation is voyeuristic. Both are shallow and unreliable forms of expression, if sometimes useful and personally satisfying.
4/17/2007 10:39 pm
Because the Times has no connection to this community or these students; because it feels corporate rather than authentic. It reminds me of the scene in Alien III in which Bishop tries to persuade Ripley that he’s really not interesting in capturing the alien, he just wants to help her, really….
So I think the crucial point is authenticity. If this were on Facebook, or the local Virginia newspaper, or the VA Tech paper, that’d be one thing.
Conversely, if the Times had done the exact same thing for 9/11 victims, I wouldn’t have had any problem with that.
This time, though, it feels more like the paper is doing this to try out some experiment on the web, rather than because it really cares.
And by the way, I don’t buy into your characterizations of blogging as shallow and unreliable. Shallow? Well, compared to a book, perhaps, or a good magazine article. Compared to most conversation? The Boston Globe? E-mail? Phone calls? Text mesages? Memos? Evening news?
I don’t think so. Blogging may not be Faulkner, but it does require more sustained thought and discipline than do most everyday modes of communication. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself.
4/17/2007 11:02 pm
You’re stretching here. For most of its readers, the “Times” is a national newspaper, not a local newspaper. Most of them have no more connection to the 9/11 victims than to the VT victims, except insofar as there were more of the former and because of their status they may have been more connected to the rest of the world. But not because they were New Yorkers. Granted the Times is experimenting, and maybe this experiment won’t work; but blogs are an experiment too, which surely won’t be done exactly the same way in another 10 years.
4/18/2007 7:32 am
Maybe for most of its readers, the Times is a national paper, but we New Yorkers still think of it as a local one (no matter how lame its local coverage is).