media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Publish or Perish

(Jan. 5, 2012)  My fatal flaw as a journalist was that I never cared if people read my work. That made me more artist than journalist, though talent-wise I was more journalist than artist. For a journalist, publication is everything; there is no point in the creation if it doesn’t get published. The artist takes pleasure in the creation itself. What separates the true artist from the pop artist is that the pop artist strives for mass audience or mass consumption of the creation.

This is the age of the citizen journalist and the pop artist. 

What got me on this train of thought was an article by Mattathias Schwartz in The New Yorker last month about the origins of Occupy Wall Street. In it he says that Micah White doesn’t use Facebook. White is the senior editor of Adbusters magazine, which came up with the idea and organized the first encampment. White calls Facebook the “commercialization of friendship,” Schwartz wrote.

When I read that line I felt as if I had just taken the red pill from Morpheus. (Matrix reference, for readers who avoid insanely popular movies.) First corporations slap their names on our beloved baseball stadiums. They put ads under our feet in the subway terminals. They get us to turn our chests into billboards via logo T-shirts and sweats. Then Mark Zuckerberg comes along and figures out how to get us to stick ads on our daily chatter. For the sitcom Friends to seem at all realistic today, the producers would need to cover the coffee table in Central Perk with a link to Farmville.

Facebook has managed to commercialize our coffee klatch by tapping into a deeper trend: The compulsion to publish, something that once only the wealthy and the brilliant had the ability to do.

About 2,000 years ago Julius Caesar blogged his battles. Well, of course he didn’t exactly blog them — the Internet didn’t exist for two millennia. But every day he dictated to slaves the exploits of the army he led and had a copy sent out via runner to Rome, where other slaves copied it and distributed it throughout the city. Since he was a Roman Citizen (a title which conferred elite status) you might call him the first citizen journalist. To communicate to a mass audience back then you needed a lot of money. Our history, I like to say, was written by those who could afford to write. After Guttenberg invented his press you no longer needed slaves to spread news about your exploits. Martin Luther could kvetch about the Catholic Church and have his ideas spread throughout Europe as people bought and passed around copies of his books.

Over 2,000 years, publishing became much easier and way cheaper. Now everyone can publish anything. News of their exploits, their complaints about the church, what they made for dinner, what they saw on the way to town, what their baby ate for dinner. Anyone can turn their thoughts into memoirs and publish them in book form via Kindle. And since they can publish, so many feel compelled to publish.

Rene Descartes once shocked the world with this notion: I think, therefore I am.

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