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Technology And The Decline of Gonzo Journalism

Posted by Hemos on Mon Jul 31, 2006 07:22 AM
from the hst-why-did-you-leave-us dept.
Media Technology
johnny maelstrom writes "Pitchfork has an article on how being unable to write about technology has dumbed-down the media. It's quite interesting to see that the formulaic writings in the technology media and the assumption that we don't all get it has lead to a stagnant media. They call for the next Bangs or Thompson and a revival of Gonzo. From the article: 'They [the audience] want a tastemaker, a voice of authority, who can put it all in perspective and knock our heads together with his or her crazy-yet-dead-on arguments. But I think I've found the answer: We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.'"
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  • I'd do it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AltGrendel (175092) <ag-slashdot.exit0@us> on Monday July 31 2006, @07:25AM (#15816319) Homepage
    If I could write.

    And if they could read.

    • We have John C. Dvorak.

      Bangs, Thompson, O'Rourke, and now Dvorak.

      There you go...no need to read any further, our borders are safe. Carry on.

      • Re:Taking advice from Pitchfork? (Score:4, Informative)

        by cecille (583022) on Monday July 31 2006, @10:09AM (#15817344)
        Gonzo journalism inolves blending fiction with non-fiction

        In some cases, yes, Thomson readily admits to having stories that have fictional components In particular, he admitted publicly on numerous occasions that fear & loathing in las vegas was party fictional (probably because it's not the best idea to write an entirely truthful story where you admit to committing a large number of felonies).

        BUT, F&L is the exception, not the rule and it was marketed as a novel, not as a journalistic piece. HST did write things that were partly fictional, but the idea behind Gonzo journalism really doesn't have anything to do with fact vs. fiction at all. The idea behind Gonzo journalism is that no journalist can really say that they are completely unbiased about anything, so a gonzo journalist goes completely the other way and writes themselves right into the story, readily admitting and embracing bias and effectively becoming part of the story they are writing about. They aren't fictional though. This is actually something that Thomspon wrote about in some of his books and he is very adamant about it.

        More about gonzo here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo [wikipedia.org]

  • HST's classic article (Score:5, Informative)

    by hotspotbloc (767418) on Monday July 31 2006, @07:34AM (#15816357) Homepage Journal
    It's a must read: "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" [nyud.net]. Personally I blame the decline on the lack of good drugs. =)
    • Oh, there's still plenty of good drugs out there. (John Dvorak should be proof of this.) Maybe even new and different kinds. What we've lost is expense accounts. Can you imagine a reporter for cnet covering Comdex and ordering a case of Wild Turkey and a crate of grapefruit from room service these days? Neither can I. And you can't even see the bats, let alone fend them off, if you don't lay down a base of Wild Turkey and fresh grapefruit juice. How many tech journalists bother to drive to Comdex, rather th
    • Perhaps you meant this solely as a joke, but I think you hit the nail *right* on the head. It's something we don't like to talk about in our society, with its War On Drugs. For many people, drugs are recreational; for others, they're dangerous; for a few - like HST - they are cathartic and catalytic. For all of our history, we've sought altered states of perception for inspiration, whether it was the sweatlodge and peyote, wode, self flagellation and trance, alcohol, you name it. The shaman has always walked 'between the worlds' and come back with a perspective the rest don't see. In the case of acid - we've all encountered the old saw about "Anyone who's taken acid more than [insert number here] times is legally and clinically insane"... but the fact is that the result, for people like HST, seems to be a perspective separated from the 'norm'; a 'new view', if you will, and we experience their viewpoint second-hand, through their self-expression.

      But the WOD has been 'won'; the vast majority of the people of HST's literary and intellectual caliber are 'too smart' for drugs, and would never even consider mind-altering experiences. And if they did, they'd likely fail the piss test that every employer seems to require. It was, IMO, the common nature of altered perception that gave rise to the electricity of the sixties. Anything that follows, bereft of unique experience, must seem prosaic and boring by comparison. As Bill Hicks said - "All that cool music they made in the 60s? *real* fuckin' high!"
      • "But the WOD has been 'won'; the vast majority of the people of HST's literary and intellectual caliber are 'too smart' for drugs, and would never even consider mind-altering experiences. And if they did, they'd likely fail the piss test that every employer seems to require."

        I think HST saw the same thing: "Bazooko's Circus is what the world would be doing every Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This was the Sixth Reich."

        America has been the Sixth Reich.

        In some areas the WoD has been hel

  • that would be cool (Score:3, Funny)

    by MarsDude (74832) on Monday July 31 2006, @07:34AM (#15816360) Homepage
    "They call for the next Bangs or Thompson and a revival of Gonzo."

    I just love the muppets !!! ;-)

    • Re:that would be cool (Score:5, Funny)

      by identity0 (77976) on Monday July 31 2006, @11:15AM (#15817823) Journal
      I am trying to wrap my head around the concept of tech journalism, Hunter Thompson, and the muppets coming together...

      "We were somewhere around Redmond, on the edge of Microsoft campus, when the drugs began to take hold...

      I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit light headed, maybe you should drive..." when all of a sudden, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge popups, all swooping and screeching about vi4gr4 all around us. "Holy Kermit!" I shouted. "What are those goddamn animals?!?!"

      "What the hell are you yelling about?" My attourney, who was pouring orange juice on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process, disclaimed. No point in warning him, I thought. He'll see those bastards eventually, the poor doomed bastard.

      "As your attorney, I advise you to run Firefox with the Adblock extention and put another rock of crack in your pipe. Wakka wakka wakka!!" Damn it, I thought. So that's why that rat-bastard Fozzie Bear was so calm.

      My consternation was broken once again when what appeared to be a large ergonomic office chair smashed the windshield of the convertible, a red '69 Cadillac from the rental agency. The chair bounced up, over our heads, and gracefully landed, somehow, on its wheels. My following of the chair's flight through the air with my neck nearly caused me to run into the most frightening thing I have ever seen. It may have been a monkey, or an ape, or some other type of beast, but possibly it was an executive from Microsoft. Whatever it was, it was huge, thick, and with a glare and ferocious face the like of which I had never seen. With a baboon-like intensity he was shrieking, "FUCKING GONZO!!! I'LL FUCKING KILLLLLLLL THEEEEEEEEEEEMMM!!!! DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELO..." and then it began what appeared to be a seizure, uttering gibberish at the highest possible volume like an air-raid siren and foaming at the mouth.

      "As your attorney, I advise you to run that bitch over and never look back - Wokka wokka wokka!!"

      That's right, I thought. Listen to the bear.

      May the spirits of Jim Henson and Hunter Thompson forgive me :)

  • More like we don't know how to read tech... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jasin Natael (14968) on Monday July 31 2006, @07:34AM (#15816362)

    It's important that people aren't sure how to interpret stories about technology. You can write an article about AOL hogging bandwidth, and while 20% of your audience scoffs at a lack of detail and your own lack of understanding, 50% of your audience doesn't understand. And rather than studying up or discussing the issue with their friends, like an average reader might do for a political or religious story, they completely lose interest.

    I think this has very little to do with not knowing how to write technology, and much more to do with the fact that it is (IMO, provably) impossible to write a tech story that is understandable to even a significant portion of the population.

    Maybe we do need a new kind of article, though. Perhaps we can display an article on the web, with a slider on the right, so readers can choose the level of detail and accuracy they're comfortable with. If they slide the indicator toward "troglodyte", then the article replaces certain nouns with aphorisms and factual statements with questionable analogies ("...a series of tubes"). If they slide it toward "industry insider", then all the technical jargon reappears and item names transform into well-known acronyms.

    • And rather than studying up or discussing the issue with their friends, like an average reader might do for a political or religious story, they completely lose interest.

      You must not live in the same world that I do...

    • Re:More like we don't know how to read tech... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AndersOSU (873247) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:23AM (#15816641)
      I don't think it is impossible for a significant portion of the population to understand tech, I don't think that it is impossible for any one to understand anything. I think you are perpetuating the real problem with the media today - they think everyone is an idiot.

      Because the media caters to the lowest common denominator no on really thinks they need to learn anything, because after all, CNN can package stories about net neutrality in 2 minute segments. I personally believe that a lot of the "masses" are more than capable of understanding the issues, we just need someone to raise the bar.

      I don't think this is unique to tech either. I think we see the same problem in politics, i.e. wiretaps, and DMCA. Rather than explain the real issues, have two talking heads barking at each other. It just so happens that this gets really ugly when technology and politics merge.

      All these failings come down to one thing - money. Let's face it news is big buisness, and journalism has known for a long time that sensationalism sells papers - they, by and large, just haven't managed to preserve the noblility of their profession while selling papers. And as a result we're suffering, and the average American is more poorly informed, they're suffering, and newspaper subscriptions are falling and news segments get squeezed out for human interest, or entertainment news.

      But hey, the politicians love it. Instead of debating on the merits of, say NASA funding, they get to preach about flag burning and gay marrige.
      • The thing is, with mainstream news sources like that, their audience IS an idiot, at least with regards to that specific discussion area. If the news was talking about Dog Breeding or Wedding Planning then your average Slashdotter would be an idiot too. Well, idiot isn't really the right word, but the result is that they're completely uninformed about whatever you're talking about so you have to start at the beginning, and since you only have 2-5 minutes to talk about it, well, there's just not much room for giving people an in-depth understanding of the problem.
      • I couldn't agree more. I'd go as far as to say it should be easier to write about hings that people don't know everything these days. I have as much hubris as the next guy, probably even more, but I'm more then willing to admit that I do not know everything. Does this make an article less worth reading? No, just the opposite! If you stumble across something you do not understand then head over to google, wikipedia or your other favourite place-of-all-mankinds-knowledge. Read up on things, gain a better unde
      • There's a difference between intelligence and education. Most people probably could understand technology, if they'd received an adequate education. But our education system has been under attack and/or allowed to fall into disrepair for so long that most people alive right now haven't the basis for using their own intelligence.
      • So. I've been a penguin-shagger since before XP came out. Who better than me to test-drive the new Windows? I set off down to the local dealer to get me some supplies. Half an ounce of solid, a big bag of weed. A strip of acid tabs. A gramme of Charlie and another couple of grammes of speed. And to top it all off, a couple of grammes of Gear and a dozen valium. When I heard Kate was coming too I was worried that we might not have enough, so I asked her to bring her own stash. I also bought some more weed, ten tabs of E and some more gear. Next stop the 24 hour Tesco, for some aluminium foil and Ribena. The booze section was still open so I picked up a couple of litres of vodka. Last of all I called at the tobacconist's at the end of my street for king-size Rizla papers.

        First stop was CD time. The Microsoft operating system comes on an even-shinier-than-a-normal-CD CD. I shoved the disc into the drive and skinned up a quick bifter while waiting for my assistant. I mounted it and had a look at the files. Nothing special. I made an ISO. No copy protection. Well, that was handy. I sparked up the dube, then shut down the PC and stripped out its hard drive.

        For a job like this I figured I had better have a decent workstation, so I'd ordered an Athlon 64 4000+, with a top-of-the-range nVidia {at least there are some i-tal drivers for nVidia cards, even if they are slow; beside which, I had plenty of cycles to spare}, two gigabit ethernet ports, serial ATA, old-fashioned parallel ATA and 8 USB ports. A case positively studded with blue diodes and enough fans to change the air in a two-bed semi in an hour. CD-RW and DVD+RW drives. Plenty of DVD+RW discs, that also worked in the TV recorder I had never sent back. A no-nonsense two-channel sound card {no point having more speakers than I have ears} plumbed through several amp and speaker combos. My trusty bipolar NAD 3120 feeding homemade speakers, a Japanese MOSFET amp working into Tannoy Mercurys, and a valve amp I had had rebuilt by a firm in Cambridge, with a response flatter than a witch's tit from DC to long wave radio into some ex-BBC studio monitors. I had a 480mm flat panel LCD, 1600x1200 pixels and not a single dead one among them. All this, you must understand, was absolutely necessary for testing the system. I had already customised Debian the way I wanted it on that machine. Now I was about to abandon the operating system I knew and loved for this Windows thing.

        Kate burst through the door as I was fitting the new hard drive onto which I would install Windows. She was giggling uncontrollably. I hoped she hadn't Made A Scene. These were early days. I had the review to write, and I needed Kate to stay sane so she could keep me sane. I screwed the drive in place and attached the SATA and power cables. Then I powered the machine up.

        "What's it doing now?" asked Kate.
        "Booting."
        "Sounds like a good idea." Kate reached for the aluminium foil. "I brought us some Naughty!"
        "And I brought us some Nice."

        So we had a boot of the heroin and a couple more spliffs while Windows started installing, and between tokes I configured another Linux box with two network cards as a highly-restrictive firewall. I thought we could log every packet going in or out of the Windows box just to see what it was sending where.

  • A word to the wise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Black Parrot (19622) on Monday July 31 2006, @07:37AM (#15816378)
    > Pitchfork has an article on how being unable to write about technology has dumbed-down the media.

    Now consider whether they can write about other topics, where you happen to be less capable of spotting any flaws.

  • Ignorance = cool (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly (148874) on Monday July 31 2006, @07:37AM (#15816382)
    It's a US cultural thing, look how geeks are reviled & marginalized. People expect technology to just work, with no effort on their part, and any failure in the execution of technology MUST be on the part of the technologist or the tool, never the user. People have been taught for the last 40 years that causality is just a conceit, that logic is optional, that feeling good about yourself is better than getting good grades, that fashion trumps form, and basically that brains are for losers. The able must serve the unable in our culture, so where's the benefit to being one of the able?

    My only consolation is that your children will reap the world that you've built for them long after I'm worm-food.
    • The benefit of having a brain becomes obvious when you see on which side of the counter you're standing at when the phrase "do you wanna have fries with this" is uttered.

      My consolation is that I will be the one saying "no thank you", not "ok, sir".

    • Re:Ignorance = cool (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Oligonicella (659917) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:08AM (#15816547)
      Geeks are not reviled and marginalized by society. They do it to themselves, then whine about how all the other members don't respect their superiority.

      Just look at the commentary here at /.; where geeks spout about things of which they have absolutely no clue as to the facts, presented with grammar and logic becoming a five year old and yet pontificate as if they are just as accurate as they are talking about the innards of some router.

    • It is not like the US has always been a society of Engineer and Scientist that suddenly would turn to other interests. There have best and worst period like everywhere else.
      The majority of people everywhere in the world have always expected the technology to just work. It is only from period to period that being a scientist/engineer in a specific field has really been fashionable, mainly when a breaktrough in science produce huge impact on everyday life and for a while look like magic.
      When the magic is over

      • Re:Ignorance = cool (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Richy_T (111409) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:38AM (#15816732)
        We seem to think that all of this great 'new' technology that we have has no social or historical reference with which to understand it in a broader scope.


        Clearly not true given the apparent urge of slashdotters to compare technology with cars.


        Rich

      • If people dropped $20k on a computer, paid $1k/year insurance (covers spamware, etc), and paid thousands if anything serious went wrong with it, had it serviced 4x/year and took it in for a quick "fill-up" of patches and antivirus every week I bet they'd "just work."
  • probably as just many members of the techno-gizmo brain-washed generation, I can't follow the historical part of the article. However I can read the Times, and Michael Elliot [time.com] and the others still create pieces worth mentioning. It's maybe a part of the "old media" that couldn't be yet digested by the junior?

    Anyway, the raised points are valid and makes you wonder: what is it worth writing about? Seth Godin (video [google.de])gives no clues, but makes you think about it.
  • But I don't think he's qualified to talk about it and, personally, I'm not qualified to comment on it.
  • ...is that the media puts so much pressure on "getting the scoop." Journalism contributes to the speed of society by hyping everything in the hope of discovering the next big thing.
     
    The stark reality is that all of these things - ALL of them - will be "mama's stuff" in about twenty years, give or take.
  • Just look at what happens here. Someone posts anything technical, and a flame war starts. If you leave out the details, it becomes unlikely that the flame war will start, because there's not enough there to decide if the author is on the opposite side from "you" and "your" tech ideology.

  • Is it a technology story indeed? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trurl's Machine (651488) on Monday July 31 2006, @07:48AM (#15816434) Journal
    pop culture today is primarily a technology story

    Is it really? I think the problem is that we want it to be. Lester Bangs wrote about rock. Rock would not exist withoug electric guitar, tape recorder and analog amplifier. Could Lester Bangs fix a broken tape recorder? Was he a great critic because he understood how a guitar works? No. He wrote about rock music as a cultural phenomenon, not a technological one. I see crisis in videogame criticism precisely in the fact that there are too many technofetish geeks covering it. We read too many reviews focusing on technical details - what 3D engine was used, how many frames per second you get in given resolution, what are the system requirements etc. We read too few focusing on the storyline, character development or the background information. It's like art criticism focusing only on chemical composition of the paint used by the painter. Ever since Gutenberg, culture ALWAYS was a technology story, but what we need now are critics writing about stories and meanings, not about the 3D engines, pixels and frames per second.
    • There's no gonzo today because people aren't interested in culture. Why? The media isn't. People get their view of the world from the media and if the media doesn't present cultural nuances as an option people aren't going to know it's there, at least not in numbers significant enough to revive interest in it.

    • Re:Is it a technology story indeed? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hrodvitnir (101283) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:46AM (#15816780)
      I agree wholeheartedly. And might I offer the possibility that this is an extension of the current climate of video games. Namely that it's becoming more and more about making it look cool and less about making a great story.

      We may even be able to expand that to a societal issue, as it seems movies are having the same problems [slashdot.org].
  • There's not a great deal of good tech journalism in the maintream press, but I'd guess that there wasn't a great deal of good drugs journalism in the mainstream press in the 60/70s either. That doesn't mean that it's not out there.

    Look at magazines like Edge in the UK - 'serious' games journalism for serious gamers. They seem to 'get' gaming, and I rarely read an article in there that strikes me as dumbing down (and if you want Gonzo-style journalism, there's always the Biffovision or Jeff Minter columns).

  • It's out there. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:00AM (#15816507) Homepage Journal
    Unfortunately, the only place you'll see this kind of writing these days are sources seen as fringe by the mainstream. You could either distill the .005% of blogs with so-called journalistic value, or you could follow things like Indymedia, [indymedia.org] or to a much lesser degree the bland-by-consensus Wikinews. [wikinews.org]

    The only reason Hunter got published at all in his day was he sold media. Then as now, the elderly media corporations aren't taking any editorial interest in what they print beyond how many papers/ads/commercials it'd sell. In Hunter's day there was the old Rolling Stone magazine (not yet a totally hideous corporate parody of itself) which ate his work up as long as it sold well to its target audience of hippies, armchair revolutionaries, and other stoned people.

    Unfortunately, the things that sell the most homogenized corporate papers and magazines these days usually mention "Brangelina" picking something out of their teeth or Britney Spears drop-kicking another baby while driving. Average Joe Sixpack doesn't want to be bothered with anything more than whether his favorite useless overpaid sports team won, who his favorite useless overpaid movie stars are getting it on with, and possibly a feel-good local piece about Granny Gums Magillicuddy who turns 103 years young this week and swears it's all thanks to a lifelong diet of yogurt and aquarium gravel.

    This could well shift as more people turn to the customizable, user-publishable news sources on the Internet, but the old school are not going to leave quietly. One result of this is newspapers' web sites renaming their columnists' writings to "blogs" and setting up RSS feeds.

  • Don't see his point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SimDarth (975287) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:09AM (#15816554)
    I really don't get his point. He's writing like Hunter S. Thompson was universally accepted and Gonzo journalism was some sort of popular revolt that was loved by all. Afraid to say that it has never been like that. Honestly, can you see the average American in the 60s or 70s clamoring for a copy of Rolling Stone to read Hunter's latest? Gonzo appealed to a certain group and Thompson was seen as the greatest by THAT group. Sure, a lot of people today love good ole Hunter, but most of that is just because he's trendy these days. Sort of like philosophy classes in college... people take them so they can feel educated not because of any REAL interest in dissecting the human condition. There are plenty of good (and an extrememly small number of great) writers out there who cover different aspects of "pop" culture. However, video games are not the same as music or movies... those writers who are great video game writers will not seem like great writers to music or movie critics as they deal with totally seperate subjects. Just like Gonzo would not appeal to the average person of the 60s or 70s.
  • The author of this piece isn't looking for a great technology writer, they're looking for a great gadget reviewer. That's a huge difference. There's no way a Thompson or Burroughs or Bangs could emerge by writing about TCP packets or water desalinization. The highly specialized nature of those fields means the background knowledge needed to frame a common allegorical or metaphorical experience just isn't there.

    Maybe the reason nobody is able to discuss pop culture to the satisfaction of the author is due to pop culture itself, or more specifically its ever-shortening average attention span and its ever-increasing demand for the Next Big Thing. The fact that technical knowledge provides the objects of pop culture's current desire is entirely coincidental.

  • I disagree: The changes just come too fast (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:21AM (#15816621)
    Look back. The 60s were the "pop/rock decade". For a whole decade, teenagers wanted music that was, essentially, unchanged for the whole decade. Sure a critic could emerge, maybe even one that was a teenager himself when the decade began.

    The 70s? Disco, Glamrock, and so on. And again, a whole decade was in Saturday Night Fever.

    80s? New wave, Synthpop.

    Sure, there were some counter-cultures, by-cultures, trends that went along and against the mainstream, but trends held their ground for years.

    The 90s started to change things. Trends started to emerge, get hyped up and disappear just as quickly again. And it didn't slow down in the new millenium. Quite the opposite. Things that are on top of the coolness list are just SO outdated within a few months or even only weeks.

    Who can keep pace? Additionally, what adds to the problem (for the writers, that is) is that today, more and more people detest the media hype and instead rely on "peer" reviews. What's hot on YouTube is not up to the editors of the RollingStone or some other pop culture magazine, but it's the other viewers. You could well end up with some crap video being the pinnacle of entertainment, because it is just SO crappy that it's rolled over to being cool.

    Badger,Badger,Badger, anyone...? Hey, ow, stop hitting me! Yeah, sure, it's over. Been over for LONG. The French Erotic Film is over (in case it ever started, that is), but that's today. 2 weeks of fame. MAYBE three if you're really exceptional. If you land 2 hits right next to each other, you're a star. For the month they are known.

    What critic could keep up that pace? The only thing this has to do with technology is that technology offers the means to spread it faster. The content as well as word about it, the ability to let others know about something cool you found, encountered or did. But aside of that, technology plays a minor role. It's just the development of pop culture, not something miraculously technological that pushes the writers aside.
    • For a whole decade, teenagers wanted music that was, essentially, unchanged for the whole decade.

      No.

      Top 40 hits for:
      1960 [cylist.com]
      1965 [cylist.com]
      1969 [cylist.com]

      Distance in time reduces our level of resolution just as surely as distance in space; we tend to think of recent decades as homogeneous chunks of time (and, if we go back a century or so, we think of centuries the same way; go back further, and it's millennia.) But they are not homogeneous at all to the people living in them. In the case of 1960's music, what made it an exciting time for music journalism was that it was changing so fast.

  • Extrapolation. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jerk City Troll (661616) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:22AM (#15816630) Homepage

    Whenever I see journalists talking about technology, I notice that most of the time they are completely wrong or way off the mark. When I think about it, I cannot recall any instance of mainstream media getting a technology story right. Whether it is ignorance or an overwhelming need to sensationalize, I do not know. But that is besides the point.

    If they are getting all of this stuff wrong, what are they getting wrong about topics in which I am not well-versed? Could it be that everything they are reporting is as erroneous and confused yet we take it at face value because we know little about the subject matter? I think that if you find reporting on technology to be crap, you should be a little concerned about everything else you read and hear on the news. But then, you should be sceptical regardless.

  • Simple solution ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jc42 (318812) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:24AM (#15816644) Homepage Journal
    We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.

    That's why we read /. and all the other fine online tech-news sites.

    Really, this is hardly a new problem. Print journalism has long had high-quality sources of scientific and other tech news, though most of them are now online [sciencenews.org]. The fact that 99% of the general public, including the mainstream media (MSM), were unaware of them didn't change the fact that good information was available to anyone at all interested. We've had weekly publications like Science and Nature for more than a century, and note that both are much fatter than Time or Newsweek.

    We do have a bit of a problem with the commercial consolidation in the MSM, which naturally goes with reducing costs by dumbing down. But anyone with access to a computer and the Net can easily spend their entire day reading good quality tech news. And that's probably where we'll find the next Hunter Thompson.

    Or maybe (s)he's already here, blogging away. Anyone got any nominations?

     

  • He's so wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gorehog (534288) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:26AM (#15816666)
    When Thompson wrote Hell's Angels he went out and learned what the life of the Angels was like and he spent months doing it. Then he spent a long time writing a book that challenged people to open their minds in order to accept what he had to tell them. Why didint Thompson address videogames? I imagine he found the experience of playing Counter Strike to be too sterile and too far removed from the hum,anity of armed conflict.

    Imagine...

    So finally I've learned all the little tricks to surviving in this hellish desert village and I've just started to rack up some meaningful kills. The avatars of children and adults lay strewn everywhere with the walls painted red from the splatter of bullet impacts. I crouch down in a corner and plant the bomb when I hear a boom and the inevitable HEADSHOT. And it's over...until someone reveals to me that he'd been watching though the eyes of he who slayed me and that I had been cheated. My assailant had been using wallhacks and aimbots, prfire scripts and quick reloading tricks, speed hacks and he'd painted a dot on his monitor. What kind of rat bastard cheats at a kids game I thought? What kind of slimy son-of-a-bitch would stoop so low? I had MONEY riding on this for God's sake!

    ok, stop imagining...

    hunter Thompson saw nothing there because of the sanitized nature of the game. When you walk away NOTHING is changed. It's why I stopped playing RPG's. If I spent all the time I wasted pretending to blacksmith online ACTUALLY BLACKSMITING I would know HOW TO BE A BLACKSMITH BY NOW.

    As for music criticism? Who needs it when I can LISTEN to the album and decide if I like it.

    There is no gonzo journalism about games because games do not deserve it. Games are what you do between doing significant things. Where's the gonzo journalism about Monopoly?

    And there's ons more thing. You cannot marginalize the far left and still expect to see crazy, status-quo shaking arguments.

  • Gonzo, please no. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gonzorob (820987) on Monday July 31 2006, @08:33AM (#15816708)
    About 4 months before his death I was lucky enough to have a few drinks with Hunter. Whilst pecking at a slice of pizza and a handful of drinks his mobile phone starts ringing. He takes it out of his pocket, stares at it.. then just drops it on the floor

    'I hate that shit...' he muttered.

    Not a man of technology ...

    Politics , yes [sex, drugs] . Music, yes [ rock and roll]. Technology - no ..

    Not medium for gonzo journalism.

    I work for the British national press and, although it saddens me to say it, the last thing journalism needs right now is more people humping the 'gonzo' thing. There are so many kids out there who think that any thing that crawls into their ADD ridden brain is 'gonzo' and therefore worthy of print. Well, it's not. It's just verbal vomit.

    In the current media climate, what journalism needs is FACTS backed up by well researched and thought out opinion. Not ten million myspace blogs.

    Anyway, that's my 2c.

    Cheers

    Rob

    PS : in my humble opinion, Matt Taibbi [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi] is doing an excellent job are carrying on the beat/gonzo thing.. check out his article in the Stone on Iraq [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/106871 89/fort_apache_iraq/] . It's well researched and well written..

    PPS: if this post doesn't deserve a modding up - I don't know what the hell does.. Also, my nickname was chosen years ago - before becoming a journalist. (to stop the trolls calling me a hypocrite ;) )

    • Re:Gonzo == crap (Score:5, Insightful)

      by -cman- (94138) <cman@c m a n.cx> on Monday July 31 2006, @08:27AM (#15816667) Homepage
      Gonzo is not crap. Gonzo and New Journalism [wikipedia.org] were a reaction to by a society under a lot of sress following the more staid 1950's. It was fuelled by the rising tide of drugs, rock, and pop culture, and the subject matter was often those sources of social tension, the war, and famously in Thompson's case, Nixon The Crook [counterpunch.org].

      I think the reason "Gonzo" and New Journalism is so underappreciated today is two-fold. One, there is just no longer any capacity to be shocked by anything. Gonzo at it's best is shocking writing that jolts one out of a staid, or concrete mindset. But what is there left to be shocked about in 2006? I think one could argue pretty persuasively that Steven Colbert does Gonzo Journalism every night on Colbert Report. But Colbert Report is considered satire, not journalism and is largely dismissed by mainstream media [crooksandliars.com]. Ditto John Stewart, of course.

      The second reason for the depreciation of Gonzo is simply dilution through imitation. There are/were so many HST wannabes (including yours truly) that the style has been run into the ground. Few people know or acknowledge that Wolfe, Thompson, Terry Southern, et. al. were serious writers who worked very dilligently at the craft of writing. It all looks thrown together, but that was artifice. For example, Thompson as a young writer used to spend evenings retyping Hemingway and Fitzgerald so that he could get a feel for the words as they were laid down on the page. Few so-called Gonzo writers today are that serious about their craft.

      More's the pity. We could use some good Gonzo writing nowadays. With all the hair-pulling within and without the media and its close observers with regards to whether "objective" journalism and "journalism as usual" serves the purposes of an informed republic, how refreshing would it be to see a serious journal take the wraps off a new writer in the gonzo style willing to rip the status quo a new asshole. Giant bats are optional.
      • I think one could argue pretty persuasively that Steven Colbert does Gonzo Journalism every night on Colbert Report. But Colbert Report is considered satire, not journalism and is largely dismissed by mainstream media. Ditto John Stewart, of course.

        I can't find a cite right now, but a coworker and I were talking some time back and he said that he read somewhere that people that got their political news from The Daily Show were more informed than those who got their "journalism" from mainstream media.
        • The survey didn't say Daily Show made them better informed (about the 2004 presidential campaign), just that they were better informed that people surveyed who did not watch The Daily Show. It's definitely correlation, not causation. People who watched any late night comedy show (Leno, Letterman) were also better informed but not as informed as Daily Show watchers.

          I don't get Comedy Central right now but I love both Daily Show and Colbert Report. I would say they inform me of issues in a way similar to scan
    • Jesus H. Christ! If a zombie ate your brain, it must have died of malnutrition! Look, gonzo-style journalism is nowhere near anything you're describing. Gonzo writing style has but one qualification over merely very good vanilla writing: BALLS. Big, sweaty, meaty, hairy, jocky balls. Think of Macho Man Randy Savage. Now think of him with an IQ of 250 and a couple PhD's under his belt, pounding a keyboard under the influence of nothing stiffer than an espresso to make sure he stays randy. That's gonzo. "If y
    • You do not have to be on drugs. You do not have to be insane. You have to be a hell of a lot smarter than average to pull it off, substance abuse and insanity is then optional. You do not have to be on drugs. You do not have to be insane. You have to be a hell of a lot smarter than average to pull it off, substance abuse and insanity is then optional. How many times do I have to fucking say it? Show me the definition where it says, "You must be THIS HIGH to write gonzo style."?

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