Interview: Talking about new media, science, and everything at CTheory
Political scientist Simon Glezos interviewed me for CTheory about my work as a writer, spanning both my academic work, my blogging, and my mainstream media journalism. It was a really interesting discussion, and you can read the whole thing here at CTheory.
Here’s an excerpt from one of my responses to Glezos’ question about what it’s like to write for a blog, with its fast-paced publishing schedule:
Luckily io9 is feature-driven, so we’re not as affected by the scoop mania of the news world. Having worked in print and online media, though, I don’t think the obsessive desire for a scoop is anything new. Scoops come a little faster now is all. The thing I love about Gawker Media is that I feel like we’re encouraged to do good, old-fashioned, nineteenth-century muckraking. One of my favorite writers is Frank Norris, who was a novelist but also worked as a muckraker for San Francisco papers at the turn of the twentieth century. I’m sure old Frank Norris would loved to have worked for a Gawker blog. Shit-disturbing is one of the foundational principles of journalism, so it’s no surprise that bloggers are doing it too.Like newspapers and pulps, most blogs are — as you rightly put it — “ephemeral.” This definitely freaks me out sometimes. I want to leave my tiny mark on the universe like any writer does, and I don’t have high hopes that io9 will be preserved very well over time. That definitely depresses me. But then I think about all those pulp writers 100 years ago, how much total awesomeness they poured into the world, even though their books have crumbled into dust. There is nothing wrong with churning out ephemera that gives people pleasure and makes them think. I’m honored to do it. If io9 fills your brain with burning images of a weird future for 30 minutes in 2010, that’s good enough for me.
Read the rest here at CTheory.
