Wednesday 3 November 2021

Podcasting Will Eat Itself


1. Despite what I said in my recent post below, people are still using the word obviously to describe things that aren't obvious. I have pointed it out to some of them who, theoretically, are 'worried' about what forces are abetting the rise of extremism. They persist. (I doubt they noticed.)

2. I'm worried that non-fiction, isn't-this-an-interesting-and-revealing-story style podcasting has a real problem. Non fiction books used to operate on a sort of cycle, churning back through the same topics every ten years ago once the world had forgotten the story of, say, the tulip mania or the Dutchman who sold Goring a forged Vermeer.

But podcasts are rapacious for content. They get through all these stories quickly. If you like this sort of podcast, you reach the point fast where almost everything that doesn't depend on in-depth reporting is being recycled.

The tendency then is to focus on the now. But if you are doing the now, you are contributing to the problem of watching the bouncing ball. Watching the bouncing ball when it is your job to say something about it is interesting makes you angry when nothing happens and you start blaming the ball. Take, for eg, some complicated negotiation that would always have taken a few months. Now a weekly group of podcasters starts getting irritable that there's still no new news about this thing and they're still speculating more or less in the dark about it. They have to say something, though, and so they start saying things like there is a kind of problem with a system that isn't getting anything done and how can we still be looking at this thing again. But some things are just complicated and take time.

And some things are a problem. But it's not hard to tell which is which from inside this environment which treats the two imposters just the same.

Again, these are the kind of podcasters who will blame Facebook for knowingly harming public discourse, and who understand that online sources of news and the 24 hour news cycle are problems. But they still can't stop themselves making the situation worse because it is literally their job.

I'd be interested in some kind of experiment where we try to look at what today's tv or newspaper news would have looked like without the internet or 24 hour cycle. It's impossible, really, but it might be on some level an interesting thought experiment. Would the same stories be the top stories? I don't know. I might do it if I weren't already behind on three plays about other subjects.

(If you don't know what these plays are and you are using this site to keep up with my news, let me tell you that you are making a big mistake.)

Monday 18 January 2021

 


Hey! I like to do this every few years or however long it is. The important things I have to say are:

1. Above are the arms of Tam Dalyell, former socialist MP. I think we can all agree they are a mess. Normally I would say that the sheer fussiness is the problem but oddly I think this one might work if it weren't for the hideous crossed weapons.

Normally, arms get muckier over time as you add achievements and folderols to pacify the families of wives you have taken because they were rich and whose daddies are furious their names will die out. But here the crossed weapons have been there from the start, because the quarter repeated top left and bottom right show the original arms of Tam o' The Binns, the founding father of the house, who was a bloody baron in the seventeenth century. He was a royalist (his reputation was probably blackened by the few of his enemies he left unslaughtered).

He also had exciting times as a successful Scots general in the armies of Moscow. Quite a lot of Scots did this and not just in Dorothy Dunnett. He also beat the devil at cards, and the devil threw the card table at him, but it missed him - the devil can't throw very straight but he has a huge arm, like an early Byron Leftwich (NFL joke) - and ended up in the pond.

This doesn't explain the naked man. If I didn't have to write a bee play I would do more research.

2. Language watch: people are using the words obviously and of course all the time and I think it's a problem. Even if something is obvious to you, if many people disagree, then it it's most likely not obvious and there is no 'of course' about it. The only alternative is that all these other people are evil or mendacious. So if you use the words, then you build a framework wherein people disagreeing with you are evil and bad. Usually, they just have different points of view or priorities.

I do it, obviously. Also, this is not saying some things shouldn't be 'of course'. Of course racism is wrong, etc. But because there are such clear wrongs going on right now, I think the language is leaking to a lot of places where things really, really aren't obvious and saying they are is digging you into a mindset that's not helping you and it's not helping me.

3. Language watch 2: broken and destroyed, used of people's emotions: 'I am broken by this news', 'This destroyed her', etc. I think this is recent (last few years). It is now solidly in contemporary novels. I assume this means it will stick and people will be surprised it didn't exist before but I think it didn't really. Certainly not in any routine way.

4. Language watch 3: I have mentioned that novelists use 'skittering' too much before. This hasn't stopped them. You'll almost never get through a book without it and very frequently you will get it more than once. This is much more often than the word appears in the world. There is something about it that really appeals to writers while writing.

(I know this because I noticed in my second book in time to reduce the skittering and I hope I took it down to one but maybe I thought I should be permitted two which I really shouldn't have been. I am so weak.)