Click the Clicks You Want to See in the World
Click the Clicks You Want to See in the World
March 31, 2024, 10:31 pm
Filed under: art, community, technology, voting, writing | Tags: clicks, Ezra Klein, Internet, Jezebel, journalism, local news, New York magazine, Rebecca Traister, Search Engine, tech, The Onion, weird quirky websites
The podcast I was listening to was about the crisis in journalism — about how so many news sites were disappearing, how so many journalists are losing their jobs and about how the landscape was changing so dramatically and not for the better. (This country has lost one third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists since 2005 and it is accelerating.) I was only half listening — truth be told. I was still pretty wiped out from COVID and I was dozing a fair amount. But then — after a history lesson in how journalism was funded and then how that landscape shifted and then shifted again — I sat bolt upright at a concept the guest (Ezra Klein) brought up. He said we should not think of ourselves as consumers of the internet but as generators. His feeling was that we are all rather passively engaging with the internet, without realizing that we are creating it while we do that. Basically, the idea is that we are creating with our clicks. What we engage with and look at and pay attention to is the internet we create. If I want to see local news, I have to subscribe to local news — or at the very least — visit local news sites. If I want more independent media, I have to read independent media. I can’t just wish for these things to exist.
I recognize my own behavior in this. When Jezebel was shut down, I was pretty upset! RIP the last popular feminist media! But I hadn’t visited Jezebel in ages. Truthfully, since they were bought by G/O Media — they were starting to fall apart. But even before then, I wasn’t over there much. I appreciated that Jezebel existed but I didn’t do anything to help continue its existence. (I learned while researching for this that it is coming back via Paste Magazine. Hooray for Zombie Jezebel!) As Klein said, if you want the publication to continue you have to read it. If you want the podcast to continue, you have to listen to it. If you want an internet with blogs and independent media, you have to read them. We create our own internet.
In other words, wailing about the evils of social media while continuing to scroll through it for hours, doesn’t help create alternatives. If we go through the portals of social media to get to our media, we are enforcing the need for social media to filter our media for us. I do this. And I get the internet that I create — a world filtered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bsky, Mastodon, etc. If I like something, I can’t wait for it to show up in a feed, I have to go directly to it. Additionally, Facebook has been showing people less and less news in their feeds. This has throttled traffic to news media which has, in turn, lost them a lot of advertising dollars and threatened their existence. Or killed it entirely. If I want it, I have to go to the thing and click there.
I have often thought of this from my own perspective of my needs as an artist, engaging with the internet. There are a lot of people who express that they’re glad I do what I do but only a handful that engage with my work and even fewer that support it. This is as true of my off-line theatre making as it is with my podcasts, my blogs or music. I know directly what happens when people don’t engage with my work. (I feel bad mostly.) But there have definitely been times where the direct line of a project living or dying is very clear. Our first season of our first audio drama, The Dragoning, took almost a year to finish because the funding was so slow to come in. We weren’t holding episodes back because we wanted to be withholding — we just literally couldn’t make a new episode until we reached the episode budget. Eventually, we got there. And the show has charted around the world. But it was clear there was a big disconnect for a lot of people between support for the podcast and its ability to be made. And it’s not just about money. If more people had listened to the show, (downloaded the show, even put it on play and walked out to do something else), if we’d gotten more numbers, perhaps we could have found some funding through advertising. But podcast advertising is a numbers game and if you’re not getting a minimum of a thousand downloads an episode, it’s not a game you can play. I had ads on the podcast version of this blog for a week and a half and made a grand total of $1.38. It’s very clear to me, as a creator, how peoples’ investment can make the life or death difference in a creation. I don’t know why I hadn’t really put it together as a user of the internet.
As Klein put it, “If you want Pitchfork to exist, you have to read it.” Anything we want on the internet (and I would argue, out in the world, too) we have to engage with it. Ezra Klein on Search Engine:
“Every time you read one thing over another or watch or listen to our spend time on, you are creating more of that thing and less of other things, right? There is still some money that comes from just, like, your attention. Then a level above that, when you pay for anything, when you become a member or subscriber, then you’re really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other.”
We turned the vibrant disparate quirky internet into a series of social media sites. And if we like that — cool — that’s what we have. But if we want other things, we have to engage with them and we also have to pay for them. I really want to do this. I want more art; I want to pay for more artists. (I’d love to support my fellow artists on Patreon: like Alexandra Scott, Betsy VanDeusen, Dance Naked Creative, Monica Byrne, Michael Harren and so many more.) And when I start to make a living wage, that’s the first thing I’m going to do. Meanwhile, though, to create the internet I want to see in the world, I have to actually click on my values. I can’t just like the funny Onion headline on Twitter, I have to click on the article and go read it — on the Onion’s website. If I want more Onion, I have to read the Onion.
But this is the thing, though, I used to read the Onion cover to cover when it was a paper publication I could just pick up on the street. Now I have to remind myself to click when I see an article go by on social media. And once I get over there, I don’t read that whole issue. I just read what I came for and get out. I’m guessing we’re not going back to paper but it was a lot better for some things. I currently read every issue of New York magazine because I subscribe to it. It comes in the mail and then I read it. For me, subscribing means I get both local news and a way to voice my support for one of my favorite journalists ( Rebecca Traister, who writes there). I know other publications languish because I chose that one. That’s my current vote — since I don’t really read much news on the internet. Which I guess is also a vote. But if I want the old quirky internet full of funky weird websites, I have to visit those!
Oh hey, if you need some ideas on stuff to click on, I put a bunch of links in this piece. Click away!
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on April 1, 2024.
