Reaction to the new Globe and Mail has predictably been mixed, with many complaining of a ‘dumbing down’. But has the web rendered such complaints more complex than they appear?

Any time a major cultural institution like a newspaper undergoes change, there will obviously be a mixed and often vocal reaction. So when the Globe and Mail, probably Canada’s most ‘prestigious’ daily, underwent a major physical and online overhaul last week, many felt as if the pleasant taupe living room they had quietly and comfortably sat and drank coffee in for years had suddenly been painted bright pink. Things had changed – and to many, it seemed not for the better. (For an excellent piece on the transition itself, read Jason’s McBride’s great piece in Toronto Life here.)

This much was predictable. I still distinctly remember when, in the mid-nineties, the G&M went from black and white to colour; even then, many complained that the new paper neither felt like the Globe, nor retained its original intellectual heft. The same has happened now – and fair enough. When key parts of our culture respond to broad cultural and economic changes – like a shift to the visual or an upheaval in advertising – people are understandably worried about whether those changes are good or bad.

I have yet to see the new physical paper, but if my Twitter stream (which is full of Toronto writers, editors etc.) is any indication, the complaints about the new Globe are that it is dumbed down, and it seems an increase in visual impact has come at the expense of journalistic and intellectual depth. My ‘twitter friend’ Helen Spitzer, for example, complained that when searching for intellectual stimulation from her own country, she had to give up on the new G&M and CBC radio and, out of frustration, switch to NPR.

This feels like a real and very legitimate worry: if the lynchpins of public discourse no longer provide provoking, considered appraisals of the contemporary moment necessary for a kind of ongoing critical reflection, it certainly feels as if society as a whole will suffer. Without the critique of an engaging, dynamic intellectual discourse, it’s at least possible corporate interests could gain further influence on political p0licy, or oppressive or vapid discourses may propagate further in mass media.

Yet, something I’ve been wondering about a lot recently if some of this unease doesn’t stem from what one might call pre-web thinking. More specifically, I’m curious if we’ve thus far judged cultural criticism by how closely it adheres to what I now call a “critical categorical imperative”: the desire to see that each piece of journalistic or cultural criticism perform an ideal, universalisable act of judgment that all others should emulate. If you review a film, it should be written the way all film reviews should be written; if you comment on a political situation, it should be done so others will strive to comment etc.

It’s certainly true that journalism and writing in general have always been a conversation. But I do wonder if the sheer scale of the online conversation has done something to the responsibility of each part of that conversation to be ‘all-encompassingly’ good. Previously, any piece worth reading must have done what good writing does: reconfigure your relationship to the world such that your understanding of it changes.

But if the flow of conversation and discourse in a society occur at an exponentially greater scale – in which people commonly read or stumble across numerous views, infographics and video clips of the same story – does writing still have perform that momentous task?

I ask for two reasons:

1. First, is that I’m curious if the aggregated collection of ‘dumbed down’ articles, infographics etc. together constitute a better intellectual representation of an issue as a whole than a single article does alone. Do the collected snippets and graphics, rather than in-depth writing, may form a new, networked mode of intellectual depth that gains its heft not through individual expressions of mental rigour, but through aggregated parts that form a virtual whole in the individual?
2. And second, does the attention economy – the scarcity of attention produced by the mass of information available – mean that the responsible thing for a publication to do is to provide less ‘weightiness’ and more quickly digestible information – with the expectation being that people will fill in the gaps through reading multiple, bite-sized sources?

Often, those most likely to complain about the web dumbing things down are the kind of people who use the web precisely in the manner I’ve mentioned: as an expansion, rather than contraction, of their knowledge base. Yes, specific moments of attention shrink; but people also consume far more information throughout their days, putting together pieces of cultural analysis into something like a messy, but cohesive personal whole. The mass of news, opinion and analysis online means it’s at least possible that an aggregated collection of ‘dumbed down’ media outlets together form something smarter and, well, better than we had in the past.

The obvious problem with this approach is that, rather than reading this so-called aggregation of ideas, the issues attention economy may mean that people actually only pay attention to the same number of stories but at reduced depth. Yet given the social dimension of how people gather information, this seems less likely; it’s quite possible that through our  Facebook and Twitter feeds, we are inevitably exposed to ‘more’, whether we want to be or not. I honestly don’t know.

I’m not at all sure what the web has done something to the critical categorial imperative. It is quite possible that the fracturing of attention means it’s actually more important than ever. But I guess I remain unconvinced that ‘culture has gotten more stupid’ when, with a few short clicks, you can be exposed to far more good, rigorous, in-depth writing than you ever could before – while aggregation tools like Facebook, Reddit or Google Reader mean that it’s just much easier to consume all that extra stuff.

So if the new Globe and Mail is dumbed down, will it matter? Can the collected analysis of hundreds, maybe thousands of other outlets, writers and bloggers make up for ‘what was lost’, forming a kind of always-plural, interconnected matrix of ideas rather than individual pieces standing for something larger?

Or am I just tired of the relentless negativity, and am simply looking for a silver lining?