[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was talking about editing. Oh, yeah. So editing.
Rick Rosner: I only want to give a few details if somebody you work for reads this.
Jacobsen: Yes. I write for a place. Some of the articles are great, but other ones could be better. This is more general advice. When you have pieces that aren’t good, you see common patterns, things like everyday use, things like word choice, and things like tone if you think of a more advanced level. So it’s the difference between telling a story of intimate partners “choosing one another.” And then, in another case, using the word “select,” “selection,” or “selecting” because that word “select,” “selecting,” or “selection” is more in a technical, distant sense. It’s almost scientifically dominant, for instance, evolutionary psychology, that we’ll talk about “mate selection.” These individuals “selected” one another. This person was designated.
Rosner: You’re talking about people forming partnerships, and you’re editing articles based on that, and you need to see more logical reasoning.
Jacobsen: I’m seeing sloppiness at different levels. One in terms of basic writing. Others are at higher levels in terms of tone and word choice. So, the word can work. The style is slanted. If they tilted the technique more and picked a more appropriate word, the articles would be outstanding. So I’m looking to ask you as another writer. What are some things that you notice come up in writing?
Rosner: The deal is that it used to be relatively expensive compared to now to publish material. You had to have a printing press. You had to have paper. You had to have a means of distribution. And now it’s cheap to publish material. And the competition in keeping your source of reading material alive, whether it’s a newspaper or something else or some kind of the online component of a newspaper or some website, is clicks and monetizable clicks, which means that writing can be total crap as long as it gets you a click. This is something that is not news; people have known it now for, I don’t know, probably close to 20 years. And it means a bunch of bad writing habits are supported.
Getting the information out there first is enormous. Like, when a death is announced on Twitter or some other social medium, maybe two to five percent of the time, it turns out not to be true. But people need to rush to get the clicks to be the first people to announce it. The rumours, if they confirm people’s worst suspicions about people or institutions, are supported, and they turn out to be another, five, ten, twenty percent of the time not true. The race to get clicks supports many things that are counter to good writing. And I’ve found, over the pandemic, that my ability to read an entire article has degraded, and the number of books I read is down by, I don’t know, probably ninety-five or more percent.
My patience with what I don’t want to know is that I look for what I might want to know is super low now, and so is everybody’s. Google and the rest of the internet have wrecked everybody. People used to have to browse through books and encyclopedias, hoping to be able to put together an informational picture of the question they were trying to get answered. I thought it was a well-researched question like, “How old is the universe?” You can get that question answered given the best knowledge of the time. Via books and encyclopedias, it’s a famous research question. But like more esoteric questions like, “If the universe is this old, how wide is the universe?”, which turns out to be complicated because space is expanding as you’re looking back on the history of the universe.
So the universe you’re looking back on, anyway, the answer is the universe is 14 billion years old; the universe is not, two times 14 billion or twenty-eight billion light-years wide, esoteric mathematical relativistic reasons. But good luck tracking that down in a book or encyclopedia, especially in a way you could understand; you’re some nerdy kid in eighth grade. But now you punch what’s the diameter of the universe into Google, and you’re going to get some misinformation. But if you poke around, you’ll get decent explanations and numbers of the deal. And see, you don’t have to do the slog in the desperate search where, much of the time, you’re not going to get a decent answer, especially like, in my hometown, we were lucky enough to have the public library. It was pretty good.
I don’t know, probably fifty thousand to eighty thousand volumes. And then we have the college library, which has a million books. But if you’re in junior high, you don’t know how to use the college library. But anyway, the natural sources weren’t there. Now, they’re here in abundance. And I, among everybody else, don’t have the patience for long searches. I came up with a game show like, I don’t know, during the Writers Guild strike in 2008 called “Search Party,” which was just people competing to find things on the internet while being tortured, in TV-type ways, Nickelodeon type ways, squirt guns and dropping slime on them. One of the questions was, “What car was Sonny Corleone driving when he got shot in The Godfather?”
And when I came up with that game, it took a bit of searching to find that answer. Now, you punch it into Google, and you could probably find that the first eight sources would have it within a second. So anyway, it’s all about getting the information first and rapidly, and all this works against good readers and writers. And there are still plenty of people who consume well-written books and articles. But the monetization, the structures that made sure that good writers could make a living doing it. Those structures have been under attack for a generation. Any thoughts?
Jacobsen: I agree. I submitted an abstract to a graduate student conference yesterday about the future of independent journalism. You’re correct. There’s been much fractionation of the traditional pathways and institutions for mainstream, like gathering, assessing and writing up information and news. So, in general, we will be left with a decimated landscape for some time.
Rosner: There’s also the cultivation of morons, at least in America and probably other places.
Jacobsen: By cultivation, you mean empowerment of morons?
Rosner: Yes. Conservative think tanks figured out that dumb people, which I don’t know; I mean, there have always been dumb people. There have always been people who’ve tried to rile up racists and dopes. And, like, just homegrown fascists like Father Coughlin and racist fashion, but the think tanks in the 70s just put together – really pinned down a strategy for turning dumb people into a manipulated demographic. An energized big group of people you could politically and… I always forget the word that you could politically… Mobilize, there you go. You can muster the dumbs. And for 50 years, conservatives have been rallying the dumbs, and they’ve painted themselves into a despicable corner where many of the remaining Republicans are fucking belligerent idiots.
And I tweet much stuff that is liberal. And the response is from conservatives are fairly consistently riddled with wrong thinking, bad spelling, bad grammar, just wrong everything. And that’s an ecosystem in which that can thrive. There’s nobody policing the dumbs. There’s nobody with good dumbs to get them to be less dumb. There might be some people. But I don’t know of them. People like the Fox News Primetime, Tucker Carlson, Ingraham, Hannity, Judge Jeanine, their whole primetime lineup. The five at least had Juan Williams token liberal-ish guy to push back, give more to yell about. But he quit. There’s nobody within that system who’s saying that we should police our beliefs and, like, try to choose some less stupid ideas. And so dumbness thrives and infects the rest of the internet—the end.
Jacobsen: Ok. All right.
[Recording End]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 