Things I hate about the Web: immediacy

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, November 15, 2007 11:58pm

Last week, I began my popular blog series "things I hate about the Web" with a post on information glut. This week, I'd like to add to that glut by complaining about another thing I hate about the Web: immediacy.

I realize there are some high-falutin' definitions for that word (Dictionary.com suggests, among others, "lack of an intervening or mediating agency"), so let me be clear that I'm going for the painfully obvious definition here, the kind you always hated when you looked up a term in the dictionary when you were a kid — that is, "the condition or quality of being immediate". That is, things on the Web move too dang fast.

Oh, I know, that's what's so great about the Web, right? You can find out what's happening all around the globe, or in the streets of your town, all in a matter of seconds. And that's all good and well. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the Web is amazing in its capacity to deliver information as quickly as possible.

The problem, as always, is people.

The Web can deliver information almost as soon as it happens. The problem is that people are not as capable of writing about it quite that immediately. Or, more to the point, they're not capable of matching the Web's speed while writing well.

I'll bring it back to me because, well, that's what a blog is for.

I get annoyed when a story appears on a local media outlet's Web site, only to have someone — occasionally even a different media outlet — comment that, nyah nyah, that different media outlet already beat them to the punch.

It's not that a reporter shouldn't be proud of scooping the competition — I respect it when that happens because someone's a good journalist and he's been doing good research and he simply got the story before anyone else.

But these days, scooping the rest of the media can be a matter of hours or even minutes — the same time frame (or less) that it takes to even write a story.

Given how many stories in a newspaper stem from crime reports or press conferences — that is, events for which all reporters have pretty much equal access — being the first one to publish a story on the Web doesn't necessarily mean someone's a good journalist. It just means he wrote his story the fastest. Which makes me wonder what corners the author cut just so he could have Web bragging rights. Did he get any facts wrong? Fudge any quotes? Or maybe just skipped some much-needed editing?

But enough about hypothetical journalists. I got off track — let's bring it back to me again. For real, this time.

See, I'm frequently stymied in my attempts to blog about something because I can't write quickly enough. I'll see some story online or (yeah, it happens) in a newspaper and start a skeletal blog post to remind me to flesh it out later, only later never comes and I delete the entry (or, worse yet, keep telling myself I'll eventually write it).

Now some of that is due simply to my laziness. I have other things to do — like, say, compulsively read the comments on way too many friends' or media blogs (I even created a Web service [cough] screenscraper [cough] that tracks other people's comments for me — I'll blog about it ... some day).

And then there's my verbosity. Perhaps you've noticed it. It would seem I have a hard time feeling I've truly written about something unless I've pounded out several hundred words on the subject, and those words take a lot of time to write. And edit. And compulsively rewrite. And attempt to shoehorn humor into. And undo that attempt. And so on.

But, back to my thesis, the reason my slow blogging is such an issue is that it results in my writing about matters that are at least several days old, if not weeks or months. And as an appreciater (and compulsive consumer) of the Web's super-speedy text-delivery service, I just know that talking about such ancient history won't fly. (Any more, frankly, than will super-long text like this. The Web demands fresh and to-the-point. You want old and windy? Buy a magazine!)

I mean, what's the point of having a blog deliver my thoughts at the speed of light if I'm not going to talk about something that happened today? That's why so many of my posts just deal with the minutiae of my life — there's precious little immediacy to what happens to me, and most of you wouldn't know if what I wrote about happened several months ago, anyhow.

That's one reason I don't blog about politics — I can't crank out a blog post fast enough to respond to the speed at which stories come out.

But the question I have is: should anyone be able to write analysis (political or otherwise) at the speed of the Web?

(As an aside, I want to note that almost all political blogs are nothing more than analysis. For all the blather — from the left and the right — about blogs surpassing mainstream media, there are precious few that actually do what the media does, which is to actually discover news stories with facts and quotes. In fact, most would-be-media-slayers base most or all of their content on stories written by those they would triumph over, leading me to wonder: if the blogs kill the media, is all we'll be left with analysis? And analysis without reporting to back it up? And is that a world anyone wants?)

Anyhow, analysis is about, well, analyzing. That seems obvious, until you consider that Web analysis so often isn't — there's no time! You read a story and then bam! you react to it. No time to consider alternate angles. No time to look for corroborating or contrary facts. The best you can do is lead with your (biased) instinct and hope to fit your reaction into a preconceived (biased) framework.

Which is red meat for the red-and-blue set. But rarely insightful, and even less helpful for the state of our political discourse.

To put it another way, I've heard it said that the problem with 24-hour news channels is that they presuppose that there is 24 hours' worth of news to report on each day. There usually isn't, but those channels can't admit that — who'd buy ad time then? — and they know you'll get bored if they repeat the same stories over and over (sorry, but it's true, Headline News), so they go out and dig up news that isn't news at all, but at least it's entertaining. And that's how CNN and Fox News came to be what they are today. Namely, a joke.

Given that, the problem with the Web — or at least Web commentary in the blogosphere — is that it presupposes that news can be analyzed and reacted to at the same rate at which it is now delivered. At a meaningful level, it can't (sorry, "Instapundit", et al.), and so true analysis gets chucked out the window in favor of hammering square pegs of news into your own preconceived round holes.

Or maybe I'm just grumpy because I created the skeleton for this article on November 7th, over a week ago, and spent too many hours thinking about it (interspersed of course with copious amounts of catching up on other blogs and comments on those blogs).

Regardless, I welcome your instant, ill-considered, poorly-edited thoughts in the comments.