:: My Tipping Point ::

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

I just came across a review in The New Yorker of Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter"*. When I read it, I became angry, not because of the content of the review itself, but because of its author: Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell's a best-selling writer, commanding an estimated $800,000 a year from speaking engagements alone and having his book "The Tipping Point" become the blow-up doll du jour for the trend-horny MBA groupthink priapism, so I'm certainly not impugning his ability to understand "EBIGfY: HTPCIAMUS", nor formulate clear and cogent opinions thereof, for I am certain it dwarfs that of yours truly - and I'm not being facetious. Plus, his body of solo work aside, Gladwell's a reviewer for The New Yorker and eminently qualified. But my first thought when I saw his name in the byline was "this is as insular as having Ben Stiller review an Owen Wilson movie".

The comparison is less shoehorned than it might appear at first. Sharon Waxman wrote an article just this past March about how Stiller, Wilson et al. had formed "Hollywood's funniest clique" - a loosely-affiliated group that cross-pollinated each other's work and created an audience for themselves largely out of sheer persistent inundation and the Will to Humor:

The funnymen appear in one another's movies, from "Dodgeball" to "Anchorman" to "Elf" to "Zoolander," creating a wheel-of-comedy effect that can leave viewers wondering just whose movie they're watching. What's more, the stars and their representatives live, work and play in a continuum that has virtually shut the studios out of the development process. By coming up with their own concepts, finding screenwriters and then offering the whole package for production - script, director and cast, take it or leave it - this group is reshaping screen humor to their liking.

Well, there's a new clique of pop academics ("nü-business' most prescient cabal"? "publishing's keenest cadre"?) adopting the very same "smart-dumb" ethos as Waxman's subjects and targeting it squarely at corporate America and armchair socio-futurists. It includes, at a minimum: Gladwell, Johnson, James Surowiecki, Chris Anderson, and Stephen J. Dubner**. Now writing texts like these doesn't involve the same type of cross-casting and side-by-side collaboration as creating a motion picture might (though I'd love a Gladwell cameo in "The Long Tail"), but there are interconnections that would make the Hapsburgs blush. Gladwell and Surowiecki both work full-time for The New Yorker. Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired, where Johnson is a contributing editor. Johnson also happens to write for The New York Times Magazine, to which Dubner - an editor at the Times for several years - is a regular contributor. Oh, and Dubner writes for The New Yorker too. They know each other. They like each other. Here's Steven Johnson's reaction to Gladwell's review:

it's especially nice to have [a review] written by Malcolm Gladwell, whose writing and ideas have influenced me in a million ways, small and large, over the past ten years.

And what about crossover in readership? Here's a screengrab from Amazon.com, telling us which other books purchasers of "EBIGfY: HTPCIAMUS" bought, as of today:

Dubner, Gladwell, and Surowiecki. For a book by Johnson. Only Anderson's missing and I have a sneaky suspicion that's because his book isn't finished yet (you can interactively explore this incestual relationship using this java-based Amazon catalog browser).

So why, oh my god why, do I care? Let me pull from Waxman again:

"We are all the spawn of Hal Ramis," Mr. Apatow said, referring to the director or co-writer of the last generation's touchstone comedies, like "Animal House" and "Meatballs."

"Starsky and Hutch" was funny. Was it "Animal House"? No, but the comedies by these new Hollywood funnymen don't need to - and make no pretenses to - strive for classical resonance, deep cultural significance, or high societal import. They're funny in a disposable, hollow, meringue cookie kind of way. It's precisely why they're enjoyable. But what about the authors?

If the smart-dumb comedians are the spawn of Harold Ramis, the smart-dumb authors are the spawn of Marshall McLuhan.

"Blink" was insightful. Was it "The Medium is the Massage"***? No. Hecky naw. One aspect of McLuhan's imperishable legacy was that publishers began to address a new niche, a quasi-scholarly soup of prognosticating think-pieces and societal introspection. Neil Postman's 1986 book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death", comes to mind, if only because it posits the antithesis to Johnson's "EBIGfY: HTPCIAMUS": that television was, due to the inherent nature of the medium, permanently and pervasively degrading public discourse by eroding our capacity to think clearly and critically. It was also described more than once as "McLuhanesque", and it's probably a bit more deserving of that adjective than any of the books by the smart-dumb authors I've mentioned above. Postman was, like McLuhan, a tenured academic; a Ph.D. unworried about offending potential readers or making himself marketable to future media-conglomerate employers. Academia sealed them off, gave them perspective that being a journalist knee-deep in the ephemeral fashions and fancies of a fickle public can't, even with a sabbatical. And that's just what every one of those smart-dumb authors is: first and foremost a journalist, used to writing articles instead of books (and good ones too - the review that sparked this tirade is no exception), dependent on qualitative analysis instead of quantitative****, having just enough space to raise important and provocative questions, but coming up just short of providing the answers.

The reading audience clamoring for two-thousand-page peer-reviewed treatises is orders of magnitude smaller than the readership buying "The Tipping Point" and "Freakonomics". Anyone working a 9-to-5 job will typically have just enough time to read nonfiction bordering on academic and not much beyond it. There's a strong demand there to be exploited. That's why it's called pop/armchair academia, and it's ok. Let me state clearly: I like these books, in the same light-hearted way I like those clique-y comedies, which really - in a less-neurotic world - ought to be all I'm concerned about. But it's not, because what I see, what Gladwell's review of Johnson's book shoved in my face, is a clique achieving unquestioned acceptance and disproportionate intellectual weight through the sheer ubiquity and prominence of their collective presence, each member reinforcing the certitude of the next, an arranged power marriage of merit with marketing.

* The title of this book once again reminds me that I cannot trust my instincts when it comes to capitalization rules. In a hurry, I would have left both instances of "Is" un-capitalized, and maybe even the "Us", but upon close inspection I see why I would have been lulled into thinking that by the specious trap of using word length as a shortcut criterion when the publisher has indeed got it right. My future as a copy editor is dire.

** I'm hesitant to lump Dubner's co-author, Steven D. Levitt in with the others, since Dubner is by far the more culpable of the two when it comes to committing the exaggerations, omissions, over-summarizing, and other errors of laziness/convenience. The book suffers because Levitt's theories and conclusions are watered down - he's really just an Economics Ph.D. whose only sin is being seduced by a few dollar signs, and I can forgive a wee bit of avarice - which is the crux of my whole rant here and, I suspect, Dubner's doing.

*** Two things to say about this: 1) here's an explanation of why the title is misspelled, 2) AHA! Why is the "is" here not capitalized (see *)?

**** This varies by publication of course, but is the case for those in question.

Posted by morland @ 08:21 PM

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