I Am So Popular: Internet Bringing Us to Our Knees

Consider this—the Christians will tell you Jesus is everywhere. Well, the Internet is fast catching up. First of all, how often these days are you completely away from Internet access? And when you are away from it, is this because you have carefully, consciously run away from it?

Now try to think back to a time when you didn’t have email—what did you do with all the time you now dedicate to separating porn spam from real correspondence? And what did you do with all the time you now use to send YouTube links and forward “warnings” to friends, which you keep forgetting to first debunk at Snopes? And how about that time you dedicate to updating people you tried to escape from twenty years ago because they tracked you down on FaceBook?

Now, recall if you can, a time when you had to look up information in hard copy dictionaries, encyclopedias, and phone books. If I might, for a moment, sound like the crotchety old-school journalist I happen to actually be, let me tell you kids something: Back when I started my life as a reporter, we didn’t just walk to work barefoot in the snow and uphill both ways, we actually had to go to the library to research stuff and look up articles in periodical indexes and on microfiche.

Micro-what? Never mind. Just trust me when I tell you that less than a mere twenty years ago, life did not revolve around emails and blog posts and instant news updates. And, for that matter, our phones were connected to the walls and text messaging was the stuff of scifi prognostication.

I got an email yesterday from the editor of a print publication I used to write for. The news was not good: the magazine is going belly up and, I could tell from the email, this was a rather sudden occurrence as opposed to a decision made sometime ago to phase out the mag. I don’t know the details, but I’m guessing that a combination of the shit-hole state of the economy and the fact that selling print ads is increasingly difficult were the underlying causes for an announcement of this sudden folding.

It’s hardly the first print publication to go away. But what’s good for the trees has left a lot of us writers (and editors and publishers) scrambling to figure out what’s next for us when it comes to earning a living. Oh sure, there’s plenty of room on the Godly Internet to place our words. Hell, there’s too much room—witness the glut of blog posts, the overwhelming majority of which fall somewhere on the spectrum between dull as dishwater and sucks major donkey cock. These days everyone with a keyboard and a blogger account is a “writer.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not begrudging amateurs their blogs. And there’s a certain satisfaction I take in the leveling of the playing field. It’s no secret that ever since people started writing there have been plenty of crappy writers who get published and lots and lots of amazing writers who don’t. For example, Suzanne Somers makes the NYT Bestseller list while Confederacy of Dunces lingered in the rejection piles until the untimely demise of its despondent author, John Kennedy Toole. So publish everything online, I say—give us a chance to discover brilliant wordsmiths we might not have otherwise known— and go ahead and let God/Internet sort it out. But in the meanwhile, those of us who, during the former fat wallet days of pre-Internet publishing, could count on up to $2 per word (you read that right) for slick articles crafted for fashion magazines, this dime-per-ten-dozen Internet model does not bode well in the retirement fund department. There are so many factors involved in why the Internet is making us cash poor it’s hard to sort them out. But here are a few:

• Internet advertising is far cheaper than print advertising. So budgets to pay writers have shrunk considerably.

• Nobody wants to pay for anything. To wit: I read the online NYT about forty times per day. I do not pay a cent for this privilege. I do not buy the things they advertise. And while I try to remember it costs NYT money to publish their paper online, like everyone and their mother, I have come to expect not to pay for content. I do have a subscription to the print edition of the Sunday Times, which I really want to cancel since I read it online and since it’s a waste of paper. But I keep “forgetting” to cancel because I feel like I should contribute at least a little something to the paper.

• Outsourcing. I read (yes, in an article I accessed online for free) about a publisher in California who puts out a small town newspaper. He has all the writing done by people in India. I say “people” not “journalists” because not all of his writers are journalists. They gather information via watching webcam broadcasts of city hall meetings and getting information emailed to them and then writing up the details. They will do this for under $10 an article whereas a local freelancer, working under the old school model, might have gotten several hundred dollars for the same piece.

• Short attention span. Anyone out there know who James Agee was? He was a wife-beating drunk and posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote, among other things A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Though in my sometimes-pretentious youth I once belonged to a self-righteous group of Agee worshipping snobs, I can now confess that I always found his work rather impenetrable (I really just enjoyed boozing it up with my fellow Agee-o-philes). And yet he used to write these gazillion-word analytical theater reviews for mainstream magazines, for which he was paid a living wage. Nowadays, with ratings and reviews and everyone being a critic and no one interested in drilling down through 5,000 words for an in-depth analysis of books/theater/movies/music, those days are over. Online publications don’t need to pay writers to write lengthy pieces. They don’t need to pay writers at all with bazillions of short opinions being constantly offered by the masses at no cost.

And as for this very popular column of mine you’re reading? I don’t get paid a cent for it. You might think that chaps my ass. Or you could say that by not demanding pay I’m giving the message that I’m not worth anything. Maybe I’m a delusional, over-rationalizing idiot, but having played the online game since 1995— (when, at the risk of sounding like Al “I Invented the Internet” Gore, I have to say I had one of the very first blogs, before that word was even coined)— I like to think experience has taught me to hedge my bets and writing-for-free here has more than a few benefits.

I’ve had big time heydays during the late nineties bubble when everyone thought they would make a fortune off of this new-fangled Internet thing and they couldn’t write me enough big checks to be a “content provider” (the word writer having gone out-of-fashion at the time). Then there was the bust and you couldn’t give it away. Since then some Internet models have surfaced as profitable or at least very popular (eBay, Amazon, NetFlix). But most of us little people are still trying to figure out how to make it work for us financially.

In the meanwhile, I count myself lucky to have a good attitude about bartering. Having been cash shy most of my life, I’ve learned the value of trade. And so, for whatever it says about me, if I have a chance to write in exchange for something other than cash, if that something is of value to me, I’ll take it. So, for example, with these words I get to have a regular perch for my writing, connect with lots of people, market/publicize my other projects and, yes—if such a thing is even possible—become more popular than I already am!

I have other deals with other folks swapping words for stuff and services. I like all these deals very much. But, then, big-picture reality check— this is a cash-based-society in which we live and my lifelong movement to go back to using rocks and shells and beads for currency has been floundering since its inception. (In particular, my mortgage company did not appreciate the bags of gravel I recently gathered from my driveway and shipped to them in lieu of the expected check for $1400.)

So I keep watching and waiting to see what’s going to happen. How will this Internet God, the one that showers us with free (if questionable) information, and ways to hookup with potential mates, and time killers like FailBlog.org, eventually sustain us? I don’t know how it’s going to shake down for you, but my current plan is to produce a YouTube TV show called Knitting With Bubbles, which will speak to my addiction to yarn arts and my sick obsession with Boston Terriers. Will this be on par with a James Agee essay? Absolutely not. Will I be nominated for a Pulitzer? Only if the Pulitzer people catch on and dumb down their criteria to match our dumbed down world.

But who cares? I’ve been watching and I see how well Ravelry.com (a sort of Facebook for knitters) is doing. And I saw how insane people went for the Japanese Puppy Webcam. It’s a brave, new, often stupid world and I will figure out how to cash in as I genuflect and hum hymns to the omniscient holy Internet.

Spike Gillespie is so popular thanks in large part to the Internet. Her incredibly popular show, The Dick Monologues, will appear four times during FronteraFest Long Fringe. Information about the show, including how to buy tickets, is right here.