Thursday, October 22, 2009

Smith, Gladwell, Humphrys and the Empty Restaurant

Okay, okay, here's a blog post. I had lunch with my new friend Robert Rowland Smith yesterday. It was all perfectly postmodern, aided by the fact that we were, for most of the time, the only two people in the upstairs restaurant at the Groucho. All the 'specials' were just for us. Anyway, Robert was on Today this morning talking to the increasingly postmodern John Humphrys. (I'm worried about this word, postmodern. I'm reading Naomi Klein and she uses it to describe the neolibs and necocons. I can see what she means, but surely it fits more comfortably with anti-ideologues like me and Robert. Or perhaps not. Being postmodern, I don't know anything.) Judging by his blog post, Robert wasn't entirely happy with the way the interview went. He says, in response, '... what we need, in a world of increasingly narrow thinking styles, is to keep our minds open not just to new ideas, but new ways of knowing in general.' Having read that I came across this from Malcolm Gladwell - 'Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.' Well, I agree with Robert (he was a Prize Fellow at All Soul's so disagreeing with him takes preparation) and I don't agree with Gladwell, though if it's just a question of survival and making loads of wonga, then I guess Malc knows a thing or two. Robert's for open-minded generalists, Malc's for specialists. Being a generalist myself I don't doubt that our role is diminishing, but I don't get the assumption that being smarter means studying statistics, accounting, whatever. That, in my book, sounds dumber. In a sense, the whole point of being a journalist lies in not being a specialist and the whole point of our contemporary predicament is that we are surrounded by specialists - pundits - who, as we know, are almost always wrong about everything. Generalists may not get things exactly right but they seldom gets things exactly wrong. Anyway, I just thought I'd say that because people have been moaning that I haven't been posting and now I am.

14 comments:

  1. how can generalists be diminishing when every newspaper seems to consist more and more of generalized columns and commentary?

    There's hardly any facts left in the Sunday Times - it's all 'Why my daughter's school play should have been nominated for an oscar' and 'A funny thing happened on the way to the abbatoir today' and 'why you absolutely positively must shave your scrotum this season'

    I thought 'elitist' facts had been replaced by empathy and shared experiences

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  2. Pundits would remark, that because of the current state of the media in particular the inky branch, aspiring journalists were becoming as rare as letters delivered on time.
    Merriam-Webster's definition of a pundit is "a person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media" the blogging industry is mass media, is it not?

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  3. Nothing mass about this blog, Malty, just a few crazed types in the back of a white Transit lost on the M11

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  4. I had forgotten how good this was--but, please no pressure.

    I have seen others refer to the neocons as postmodernists--or at least Drury talked of Strauss's philosophy in those terms. The issue is nihilism, deconstruction leading to either nihilism or wisdom (letting go of dogma while retain values). The neocons are accused of not believing in the ideology--that is for the plebs--but of using it for their ends, in the manner that Strauss read Plato.

    As I am at a loss to reach the high levels of wit demanded by this forum I will leave it somebody else to explain where Bryan fits in the postmodern map (but needless to say he is no nihilist.)

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  5. If I'm reading this correctly, you'd like me to start moaning because you have started posting again? If so, I can start in the AM. Tonight I'm putting all my energies into throwing my dinner sprouts at Nick Griffin.

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  6. Steady on, Worm, you wait ages for a post and then as soon as one pops up you shoot it down !

    Academia and science are way too dominated by specialists. Economics too with terrible consequences. The Yard is, of course, the Generalissimo.

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  7. We need specialist journalists. One of the very few people to really understand and correctly warn people about the financial meltdown was Gillian Tett of the FT, who made herself expert on the acronyms that made our banks insolvent. (Poor woman). If the world is getting more impenetrably specialist, which it is in parts, don’t we need specialist reporters to make sense of it for the general reader? But then we need editors – and readers, for that matter – who appreciate this.

    I’ve always thought of Mr A as a specialist, Special Subject: Ideas (New). He’s been enlightening us about this for at least as long as I’ve been reading big papers.

    Generalists are great except when they write about something you know. To the extent that I write I suppose I might be described as a generalist. Mind you I prefer a more exotic label: I’m a dilettante, but I aspire to be a charlatan. How about: ‘How Burke Can Help You Clean Your House’?

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  8. Brit I wasn't casting aspersions at Bryan at all, merely talking about the general editorial policy of newspapers, rather than the people that write for them!

    I am by nature against specialists and their shiny-shoed starchiness. I'm all for journalistic anarchy.

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  9. Post modern as I understand it is style, appearance, or narrative over substance.

    New Labour, derivatives, R4's Today all Post Modern.

    I suppose Klein thinks as she does not agree with some substance that makes it "post modern" when even if she was right, which she is not, just makes it wrong.

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  10. How can a worm shoot anything DOWN, unless it's another worm? No se. I guess you're saying, Bryan, that one should follow one's bliss. Otherwise, be doomed to follow someone else's. I like Malcolm Gladwell -- he's a canny guy. Who's Robert Whatsis Smith?

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  11. Sir, I think the term "post-modern" is best left alone, whatever its proposed meaning. For years it has been used to justify the endless recycling of idiocy, and now - if I understand a rather glancing reference to Ms Klein - it applies to the kind of idiots who oppose recycling and, quite possibly, cycling. In any case, one's definition of "post-modern" depends on one's approach to modernity itself. And modernity - being a rejection of tradition - is usually a gimmick.

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