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Vocapedia > Media > USA > NYT > Illustrations >
2008-2009
Gerry Greaney
Op-Ed Contributor
Bright Lights, Big
Internet
July 30, 2009
The New York Times
By BILL WASIK
THIS summer, as in so many summers gone by, young aspirants to
the creative class — would-be writers, musicians, artists, editors, comedians,
performers, thinkers, provocateurs — are stepping off buses in Port Authority
and trains in Penn Station, navigating their rented trucks and borrowed cars
through outer-borough blocks. These new arrivals come to New York, first and
foremost, to find one another, a flock of other young people like themselves.
But they come also to seek success, to chase their “big break,” that vague but
real moment when, as if by magic, one suddenly finds oneself on the opposite
side of the glass from one’s nose print.
Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams,
but this downturn has proved especially dispiriting. Those in the print media
have come to see their present fiscal woes as not merely cyclical but
structural, and so their slashed workforce and diminished output seem unlikely
to rebound any time soon. Galleries have closed. Foundations, their endowments
devastated, have cut back on grants for the arts. Internships across the board
are down by more than 20 percent. And those of us who still hold full-time jobs
in creative fields are clinging to them for dear life, making it difficult for
young people to pry any free for themselves.
Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw
ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New
York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet, which over the past decade has
slowly become the de facto heart of American culture: the public space in which
our most influential conversations transpire, in which our new celebrities are
discovered and touted, in which fans are won and careers made.
Wherever young creatives physically reside today, in their endeavors they are
increasingly moving online: posting their photos, writing, videos and music,
building a “presence” in the hope of winning an audience. Monetary rewards on
the Internet are still scarce, it is true, but the cost of living is cheap and,
more important, the opportunities for attention are plentiful. Every month more
YouTube sensations emerge, more bloggers ink big book deals, more bands blow up
through music Web sites and MySpace, and every day more young people seek their
“big break” in the virtual megalopolis rather than in (or as well as in) the
physical one.
The experience of moving online actually bears quite a few similarities to
becoming a New Yorker. Disorienting and seemingly endless, the Internet
conversation moves at lightning speed and according to unstated social rules
that can bewilder outsiders. Also, like New Yorkers, residents of the Internet
do not suffer fools, or mince words in belittling them, as anyone who has
contributed a redundant post to Metafilter, or an earnest comment to Gawker, can
attest.
In their scope, both the Internet and New York are profoundly humbling: young
people accustomed to feeling special about their gifts are inevitably jarred,
upon arrival, to discover just how many others are trying to do precisely the
same, with equal or greater success. (For a vivid demonstration of this online,
try to invent a play on words, and then Google it. You’ll be convinced that
there is, in fact, “nothing new in the cloud” — a joke that a British I.B.M.
employee beat me to last November.)
Moreover, the presence of an audience causes online residents to style
themselves as outsized personae, as characters on a public stage. On the
Internet, as in creative New York, everyone can possess a tiny measure of
celebrity, and everyone pays attention to what everyone else is doing, all the
time.
Six months after my own arrival in this city, when I began a brief stint in 2000
working in the Condé Nast building, I was surprised to see minor incidents from
the elevators, or the cafeteria, appear in the pages of The New York Observer,
just as a decade before they might have shown up in Spy magazine. Today, of
course, that sort of mirthful over-scrutiny is everyone’s lot, as any
misdirected e-mail message in any city or industry whatsoever is likely to find
its way onto blogs and into the public domain.
But online, when creative affirmation finally arrives, it takes a very different
form than it has in New York. In the offline world, getting a “big break” is a
matter of impressing a subjective intelligence, one person or a few people who
look at work with an experienced eye and declare there’s something to it. Up
until now, it has been intimate encouragement that has literally set the course
of whole careers: a gallery offers a show, a record label dangles a contract, a
prospective boss plucks one résumé from a sheaf, and a path forward is set.
Such moments of recognition, by individuals or small groups, have helped to
decide not merely who succeeds but at what. A nice note from a famous poet can
cause an amorphously creative young person to throw the novels and screenplays
overboard and take up verse for life. Without intervention from The New Yorker,
John Updike might well have been a cartoonist, James Thurber a journalist,
William Shawn himself a composer.
On the Internet, however, it’s not one single subjectivity but a popular
hive-mind that decides. The “big break” arrives when, with lightning speed and
often to one’s own surprise, the inscrutable pack decides to start forwarding
one’s content around.
Like the note from the poet, the viral blowup online is transformative: The
Gregory Brothers, transplants to Brooklyn from Radford, Va., are a serious soul
band, but ever since the sudden success, this spring, of their deliriously funny
YouTube series “Auto-Tune the News” (which turns news footage of politicians and
pundits into pop jams), they’ve been devoting ever more time to keeping their
hundreds of thousands of online fans entertained. Talk to anyone who makes
culture online and you’ll often hear a similar story — of the first Web site
that took off, or the video or the new meme successfully disseminated.
And so the move online changes how we make art, but the road ahead there is
uncharted and perilous. In the old model, young creatives dreamed of
entertaining the millions, but in practice they could do so only by first
pleasing a small group of gatekeepers: established figures who controlled access
to the audience and, in doing so, protected young people from that audience, its
obsessions and desertions, its adoration and its scorn. These old hands had to
worry about the numbers, of course, but they rationalized the upticks and
downticks through a certain set of professional values, which they themselves
spent years imbibing and which they in turn pressed upon their wards.
Online, though, the audience can be yours right away, direct and unmediated — if
you can figure out how to find it and, what’s harder, to keep it. What to you is
a big break is, to this increasingly sophisticated and fickle audience, just one
forwarded e-mail message in a teeming inbox, to be refilled again tomorrow with
a whole new slate of distractions. “Microcelebrity” is now the rule, with
respect not only to the size of one’s fan base but also to the duration of its
love. Believe it or not, the Internet is a tougher town than New York; fewer
people make it here, but no one there seems to make it for long.
Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s, is the author
of “And
Then There’s This:
How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.”
Bright Lights, Big
Internet, NYT, 30.7.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/opinion/30wasik.html
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