Baldur Bjarnason

Interim note 3: text-based media in the age of showmanship

– Baldur Bjarnason

Slightly different format from the other interim notes because writing about text requires paragraphs.

These interim notes are all unedited and a little bit rough.

– Thinking about where text-based media – print, ebooks, websites, newsletters, etc. – are heading led me to start another re-read of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and, unsurprisingly, that helped a lot.

It’s easy to forget that the dystopia comparison – that Brave New World might be more accurate than 1984 – is just the hook, not the substance of the book. The substance lies in the observation that different forms of media have different epistemology. Postman outlines a history where the 19th century’s literate and text-oriented epistemology, or how meaning and knowledge is created and transmitted through textual argument, that he calls Age of Exposition gives way to the 21st century Age of Show Business where truth and knowledge are defined through showmanship, performance, and entertainment.

– I think the internet, during its initial decade or so of existence, postponed this transition, at least for a while. Text was, at least initially, the internet’s primary medium simply because of how slow our connections were. Because of that, we got blogs, newsletters, microblogging in its various forms, all of which managed to establish themselves as forms with an audience.

And as soon as we got broadband in our homes, smartphones hit the scene and the wait for broadband-level mobile speeds gave text-oriented media a little bit more space to breath.

– This is probably either already over or about to end. Video and truth comes from showmanship is the new norm with YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other primarily visual media being the default for most people. The strongest text-based form, microblogging, which is the dominant form on Threads, X (née Twittr), Facebook, and Linkedin is an atomised form of text that has more in common with the showmanship epistemology of video than it does with exposition epistemology of other text-based media.

To demonstrate the difference, for example, think about various different ways you could write about the idea that audiobook listening is not reading.

Raising this topic on social media, where microblogging dominates, even without taking a side, will almost guaranteed start a fight and might even trigger mass blocking and harassment, depending on whose attention you catch. It doesn’t matter what your context is for the statement, social media collapses all contexts so your frame of reference is irrelevant.

Microblogging creates meaning through showmanship and performance. That means that topics are defined and debated through performative factions. Audiobooks aren’t reading is a shibboleth topic – one that defines factions. One side is against audiobooks, the other is for them. Meaning for each faction is defined through showmanship.

This is not a flaw or defect in the people or the communities. This is how social media works – how truth is “made” in microblogging – and the only way to avoid it is not to participate. Everybody else around is still participating, though, so full avoidance also risks social alienation.

Compare this to a writer addressing the same topic in a section of a book, like a book on the publishing process. A section that tackles the very real production differences between an audiobook and a print book would be innocuous even if it literally had the title “audiobooks aren’t reading”. A book on reading that compared and contrasted the effects of listening and reading on memory formation, with suggestions for improving retention for audiobooks or the accessibility of the printed word would likewise be relatively harmless.

But writing on those same topics, the same approach, the same frame of reference, becomes divisive when placed in the social media context because meaning and truth there are constructed through context-free showmanship.

– This creates a tension between textual forms that borrow from books – such as newsletters and essayist blogs – and the primary modes of distribution for these texts. No matter how sensible, well-argued, and structured your essay is, once placed in a social media context both its context and frame of reference will be erased.

This, obviously, rewards some kinds of writing and punishes others.

– Books and ebooks, paradoxically, remain great products. I still believe that they are a solid deal for both the reader and the publisher – provided the ebook (PDF or EPUB) is DRM-free.

We may no longer be a epistemologically literate society any more but books still have value to enough of us for them to still be a business. However, the problem lies in finding ways to promote and sell said books because, as I noted above, microblogging only lends itself to promoting texts and creators that have a strong element of showmanship.

– One of the questions I am pondering is whether, again paradoxically, video and podcasts might not lend themselves better to promoting and selling books than newsletters and blogs, in that you can more easily get away with being topically adjacent to your longer form texts than in microblogging.

That is, you could do a YouTube series/podcast that interviewed people relevant to the topic of your book, or a series that was emotionally connected to the book, without falling into the trap of triggering a conflict with decontextualised snippets of your writing.

The problem here is that video production and podcasting are very different skills from writing and most of it is done badly. This is the same issue you run into with software design and UX: if all of your exemplars and role models are kinda crap, what you yourself do is unlikely to rise above them.

– The answer, as seems to always be the case these days, is that there isn’t a single clear-cut answer. If you want to be in writing, you probably need to be in media in general. There’s more than one way to do this and you probably need to be doing more than one thing at a time to do it.