Of course. Why should you care of what happens elsewhere?

A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Russell Smith wrote something really interesting about the fact that nobody noticed he had stopped his job of twenty years, and what this means in general.

Twenty years doing good writing

In November 2019, Mr. Smith stopped writing a regular column on art and culture for the canadian daily newspaper Globe and Mail. His beat was “aesthetic topics newspapers typically avoided”, and cultural “controversies that weren’t headline news” but Mr. Smith considered “just as important to our intellectual landscape as the left/right punditry dailies usually traffic in”.

For a while, it worked. Then, several years ago, readership was falling off, replaced by an increasing pressure to write stories that would be noticeable on “the huge moving electronic graph that now hangs over most newsrooms, tracking the articles causing the most reader interest in real time”.

Then, irrelevance. Why?

The rest of the article is about the real topic: not Mr. Smith’s career, or personal life, but “how the digital age - and especially its omnipresent “metrics” - has changed WHAT we read”.

When Mr. Smith started his column, in 1999 he told his editor that “I wanted my focus to be international and intellectual [NOT] mainstream culture - no pop music, no celebrities, no Hollywood movies”. OK, great, go ahead, was the answer.

After the 2008 global meltdown, for a while his beat “probably helped him survive [because] both at the Globe and across Canada, there wasn’t a lot of competition for what I was doing”.

Then, engagement metrics came. Analytic software started to track in real time how often an article is read, commented or shared, that is which articles would be more profitable to keep on the front page, or share even more on social media.

In practice, as Mr. Smith puts it, “this ensures the less read become even less read”, in ways that are very different, and much more intense, than printed media could ever do: “Flipping pages, you would see every article somewhere”. Not so on a smartphone, where others, increasingly often non-humans, decide what you see.

That idea of engagement was totally different from what “connecting with readers” used to mean to Mr. Smith: being discussed in academic papers. Causing debate inside mainstream media. Having influence on the few people who could make a difference, eventually, for the whole society. Software does not distinguishes among readers in this way (Me: the closest it goes to something remotely similar is distinguishing between people who can afford a paywall and the rest).

Mr. Smith’s editor suggestedto cover more varied arts subjects - as long as they were Canadian, because the software said that Canadian subjects got the most engagement.

And THIS is where the real problems start

“It is simpleminded to think that covering only the arts that exist within our borders is to actually cover our arts. Our arts are international” says Mr. Smith. If I can say so, the same applies to many other topics, these days: healthcare (think the geopolitics of COVID19 vaccines as just one examples), finance, employment…

The problem is that “algorithms that tell us which topics are trending don’t merely reflect trends; they can also help create them”. Algorithms are what makes sure that anything “slightly obscure or difficult”, it can never become popular, even if it is important.

Mr. Smith’s conclusion is that what you should not forget, and the reason why you SHOULD make an effort to find and read even “uninteresting” stuff, even, no: especially if you only read on a smartphone! Mr. Smith doesn’t think all his potential readers were not interested: “They were TOLD not to be interested”. And that cannot be good.

Images: partial screenshots of the art included in the article, by Sam Island.