No pushover, book critic Jonathan Yardley takes the measure of Hunter S. Thompson this way: “Anything he writes is worth reading, even when it radiates serious signs of having been composed under the influence of something rather more hallucinating than office coffee.” The occasion is Yardley’s review in yesterday’s Washington Post of Thompson’s latest book, Hey Rube, a collection of his columns on ESPN.com — rants, if you will — often about sports but also about anything that crosses his admirable gonzo mind.
Running through Yardley’s review, however, is an undercurrent of astonishment about the obscurity of the Internet. Until he received the book’s galley proofs he never knew the online column existed, although Thompson has been writing it for four years and drawing a reported 250,000 readers. In other words, like Yardley, “there are probably about 290 million Americans who haven’t a clue that it exists.” Thompson has the latitude to write about anything he wants not only because he’s “a nice byline,” which ESPN can trot out to boost its prestige, Yardley contends, but because “his columns are published “in the relative anonymity of the Internet,” which is “an immense vacuum that sucks everything into instant oblivion.”
Yardley isn’t that far wrong about the Internet. It’s good to be reminded of his point of view if only to temper the claims by some enthusiasts who believe the Internet has so thoroughly transformed the cultural landscape that the tipping point of the revolution is already here. Maybe so. But on the evidence I see, it’s doubtful.
For example, a pal of mine who writes for CounterPunch complains that the Web site doesn’t pay anything. Face it, pal, about a million other sites don’t pay anything either. Looking on the bright side, he says he does get “personal PR” out of it, which is useful for flogging his book. But that advantage is in fact as evanescent as the wind. Even a large readership on the Internet is less substantial than it might seem.
When I was a well-paid senior editor at MSNBC.com, I wrote a daily blog called “The Juice.” It was not unusual for The Juice to draw 100,000 daily page views. There were times it drew nearly 500,000 in a day. Those are astounding numbers. But what did they mean? That someone came to the blog and spent 30 seconds, a minute, reading it? Or maybe they spent two minutes, an eon in Web time? What kind of impact can that have?
From the metrics I’ve seen, even the biggest names writing with a sophistication that needs to be savored or takes time to digest are lucky to hold a Web reader’s attention for more than 60 seconds. Big sites trumpet their number of “daily page views.” You rarely, if ever, see them mention “duration.” That’s because it’s so embarrassing. The limited amount of time spent on a site is one of the Internet’s little secrets. Shhh. Try not to tell the advertisers.
Putting that aside, the democratic aspect of the Internet cuts two ways. Anybody can have a say. But unless it’s visible, it often doesn’t count. And visibility is determined by size, by the ability to put up a site that dominates the market — even a “free” market that costs little to enter — through mainstream promotion, manpower, technical sophistication and so on. When it comes to drawing a large audience, except for the idea that the Internet fosters small groups of like-minded individuals who discover each other and therefore can band together to have influence, the rules that big media have applied to dominate TV and print now apply just as thoroughly, if not more so, in cyberspace.
If you haven’t heard that before, you haven’t been listening. Yes, in politics and grassroots activism, the Internet has changed some things: Raising money for candidates, organizing, righteously beating the shit out of backward ideas and institutions — these have been accomplished.
But making a living on the Internet as an artist or as a critic won’t happen for a long, long time — not unless there are jobs with mainstream outfits. And by mainstream, I mean everything from Slate and Salon, which now keep a relatively few people in groceries, to CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the establishment, which have relatively understaffed online outlets themselves. Everyone else, all the CounterPunches of the world, just don’t have the visibility to make a go of a paying proposition. Until that happens, the notion that the cultural revolution has been cyberized is less than convincing.
