Thoughts On “The Gawker Decade”
Doree Shafrir’s New York magazine article on netiquette prompted a good discussion that in light of Gawker’s winning Adweek’s award for ‘Blog of the Decade’ and Mediaite christening the 00s ‘The Gawker Decade’ is doubly interesting. Particularly this from peterfeld:
Gawker is Gen X (maybe not some of the newer ones writing it now, but it’s a Gen X sensibility).
and from spiers:
I don’t think there’s a generational split. Some of the most distinctive dry, snarky voices to crop up it the last few years—Alex Pareene, Maggie Shnayerson, Foster, Sheila McClear, Moe Tkacik, Meagan Keane, half the writers at The Awl, etc—are Gen Y. I don’t think either generation has a distinct sensibility, re: dryness or snarkiness.
We’ve all marinated in the same media stew.
Thinking about generational sensibilities is much more useful than AdWeek’s (true) summation that “[Gawker] defiantly skipped magazine prose in favor of Internet snark, obsessively needling the New York-centric media world.” Indeed, but Gawker’s genius was—is—a lot more than either snark or obsessive needling. It was the perfect and, in 2002 novel, pairing of audience and product. The audience was office-bound Gen-Xers and -Yers with high-speed Internet access, time to kill and the suspicion we were smarter than the Powers That Be. The product was those Gen-Xers and -Yers voice, with traces of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and a passing resemblance to the wit of Joss Whedon characters. At the end of the decade of Dilbert, it was the way we talked amongst ourselves, the attitude that made us love The Onion and love it doubly because no one over a certain age knew it existed. And here Gawker—and Wonkette and TMFTML—were using our voice to directly take on the Powers That Be (or so it seemed, from our work computers).
Conservatives must have had similar relief when Rush Limbaugh and Fox News first came on the air: you can say that? You can talk this way? And they can’t do a thing about it?
Why hadn’t anyone thought of doing this before?
Old Media deserved every bit of Gawker’s snark. In return for being proper, authoritative and all Strunk and White, Old Media was supposed to be impartial, judicial, and, uh, reality-based. Instead, they relied on their matter-of-fact-ness as itself proof of their authority, and slacked on the facts. Judith Miller’s lies misinformation were on the Times front page, John Yoo could be seen on PBS’s The News Hour, explaining why torture enhanced interrogation was reasonable, while Jim Lehrer rejoined, “Uh-huh.” This was the era of yellowcake, mushroom clouds as smoking guns, and Ari Fleischer’s warning the White House press corps that people should think very carefully about what they wrote. Meanwhile for years cable had been telling us to worry about shark attacks and obsess about the Osbournes and OJ and…. gah, it’s all such crap I don’t even want to think about it. B.S., B.S. everywhere. Snark was long overdue. Remember Enron? Those were the days of amber alerts (as Michael Musto wrote: best. drag name. ever), while Alan Greenspan’s low interest rates and what would come to be known as the housing bubble meant that Euro and i-bank money was giving New York neighborhoods SITC makeovers while many of us were getting laid off or were simply terrified a good deal of the time. And we (Gen X and Y) could tell that something stunk, and it wasn’t the maple syrup smells drifting over from New Jersey.
Old media expected us to watch the The Attack Of The Clones as if it were good. They expected us to buy photo spreads of Brangelina (or Brad and Jennifer, at that time) but not to laugh. Old politics expected us to acquiesce to data mining and blacksite prisons and rising payroll and state and local taxes while those in the top income brackets got their taxes cut, and most importantly to buy the narrative we were told (and they’re still at it: see today’s insane bomb-bomb Iran Times op-ed, and this response by Marc Lynch)
Gawker was not credulous.
While less overtly political than it has since become—with a smaller staff, its political beat was owned by Ana Marie Cox as Wonkette—Gawker legitimized, promulgated and typified Gen X skepticism. Gawker flipped the Old Media equation of the glitterati and the lumpen masses. In the Gawkerverse, the famous are lumpen and writers—initially plucked from obscurity and given their proverbial shot in the big city—glitter. In the Gawkerverse, the rich and powerful become the writers’ property, and no longer dictate what kind of attention they receive. And the writers assume their readers are as smart as they are.
There have been a lot of complaints about snark in the Gawker Decade, cries of nihilism. Don’t like being snarked at? Then be less risible.
Snark turns out to be exceedingly trustworthy. Snark is not trying to make you believe anything. It was the perfect voice for the Bush years. By the time Gawker launched, there were few people in Old Media I trusted except Paul Krugman, Bill Moyers and most of the non-Gladwell New Yorker. And then there was Gawker Media. It made no pretense about what it was up to, and you could always trust that no one was going to lead it around by the nose.
