To walk through the streets of Toronto is to understand that this is a town enthralled by modern technology. Here, you’re more likely to see someone on an iPhone or a BlackBerry than you are reading a book or newspaper. Toronto consistently ranks among the top cities in the world in social media usage. Meanwhile, the city’s burgeoning tech scene grows from strength to strength, and Google themselves have scooped up three local startups in the past year alone. This much is clear: Torontonians are rushing headfirst into the digital age.
And here is what I can almost guarantee you. Upon reading this, many of the writers, cultural commentators and other media of this city would wrinkle up their noses, as if they had just walked by an open sewer. They would quickly launch into diatribes on the importance of the printed word, the destruction of attention spans, or our damaging obsession with trite ephemera.
That may be a slightly polemical exaggeration, but if it is, it’s not by much. If Toronto is saturated in technology, its media discourse on the subject is equal parts fearful and dismissive. Whether it’s cultural critics like Steven W. Beattie or Russell Smith lamenting the loss of book culture, or columnists like Christie Blatchford or Margaret Wente decrying the ‘mob mentality’ of the web, techno-scepticism appears to dominate Toronto’s chattering classes. Even the Standard‘s own media critic Bert Archer recently wrote about how Twitter can be a useful thing during elections, which, though a fair thought, seemed a puzzling thing to say in 2011 when it has been argued elsewhere for years.
And while not specifically Toronto media per se, it was also impossible to miss the significance of The Globe and Mail‘s recent redesign. Arguably Canada’s most influential paper, the Toronto-based broadsheet’s “billion dollar bet on print” spoke volumes about this city’s approach to the coming digital revolution.
What it is about Toronto that has made its media culture vaguely technophobic is a question I posed to Zunaid Khan. Khan is currently at online advertising venture Shiny Ads, but has worked in Toronto for years in getting established brands like Quebecor and NOW Magazine into new media. He argues that the problem is one of the city’s media culture and its deep ties to the past.
“The traditional media companies in this country are conservative by nature,” he says. “They’re risk averse when it comes to technology, and tend to be more deliberate and slower-moving.” Part of that is obviously their sheer size. Yet, it’s also about the time it’s taking for the traditional media to accept that they are no longer the sole gatekeepers of information. “They’re being forced to change,” says Khan. “They’re not as dominant a medium as they once were, advertisers have many more options, and media consumption has changed as well.”
This may be a situation then, where economics produces culture. As those in traditional media watch the shrinking of their business, they understandably express not only a defence of their models and structures, but also the values they represent, whether expertise, or the importance of long-form reading, to name but two.
But it’s not as if the ways in which the web challenges those ideals is somehow unknown in Toronto. To the contrary, the city is littered with great events like Mesh, Future of Media or Hacks and Hackers, where ‘the new’ is discussed and often very optimistically. The issue is whether or not the more radical ideas presented by modern technology – like say data-as-journalism, or innovative ways to monetize the attention economy – are filtering through media circles from the top down.
“There are a lot of people out talking about the need for media to adapt to new technology, and there are a lot great digital executives working in this town,” Khan says. “I just don’t know how many executives at the big media companies are getting it or whether the people who are trying to embrace digital media are getting access to the people making decisions.”
If the people in charge are embracing digital only when necessary, perhaps it’s unsurprising that a culture of techno-scepticism filters through to the rank and file. Making matters worse is the comparative lack of competition in Canada after years of media consolidation, which relaxes the pressure to innovate.
It’s not that a general sense of worry regarding technology is somehow unique to Toronto, of course. Just recently, former New York Times editor Bill Keller set off a storm of controversy when he suggested that Twitter makes you stupid and that Facebook replaces real social interaction (assertions thoroughly called into question by scholar Zeynep Tufekci). Similarly, some of the loudest critics of the web’s effect on our lives – Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Malcolm Gladwell – are based in the U.S. It’s something that’s happening everywhere, and is also perfectly natural and sensible. As we experience the beginning of what may well be the most profound intellectual and cultural change since the invention of movable type, a little trepidation is surely a good thing.
But if that anxiety is one half of an equation of which a breathless tech boosterism is the other, then where is the latter in Toronto’s media? How frequently does one read the Toronto feature or cover story claiming, for example, that there are upsides to how our thinking may become more non-linear and algorithm-like, or that our approach to reading is changing? Why is techno-optimism a dirty idea in Hogtown?
According to Rex Sorgatz, it’s partly to do with the degree of cross-pollination between the people in a city thinking about technology and those who think about culture in general. Sorgatz spent years wrangling with big media companies’ difficulty with the web, primarily as the executive producer of MSNBC.com. More recently though, he’s been an integral part of New York’s tech and media scene, maybe most famously now in his ongoing bet with Gawker chief Nick Denton about that company’s recent redesign.
Even New York though, says Sorgatz, that looming spectre to which Toronto is so often unfavourably (and wrongly) compared, has its fair share of conservatism.
“There’s such a fear of the new here,” he says. “I moved to New York from Seattle at about the time Twitter was taking off and I remember talking about it to friends who worked at media companies. They laughed and laughed. They thought it was so stupid.” In light of the service’s role in the recent Arab uprisings, it’s a perspective that hindsight makes look especially silly.
It’s something that is changing, though. “Everyone now feels as if they now have to give something a chance, whereas before they’d say things like ‘why would I want to tell people I’m eating a sandwich?’”, argues Sorgatz, referring to the initial critique of Twitter. “For sure, the existence of Foursquare and Tumblr in New York has made it such that people feel as though they have to try things more.”
Part of the shifting acceptance of technology is therefore about how closely intertwined the people making things that affect culture are to those who act as public interlocutors for that change. Perhaps then it’s that very lack of overlap that is Toronto’s trouble, as bookish, cultural critics largely stay far away from the tech scene and sometimes even the technology itself.
It’s not at all that we should dismiss the concerns of those who are worried about such rapid, profound cultural shifts. But if a city’s culture is in part shaped by its artists, its writers and its intelligentsia, there is something unsettling about the idea that, particularly among that group, the promise and opportunity of the web for education, the liberal arts, social change and journalism should be regarded with such distrust and worry.
After all, the more radical disruptions of the web go far beyond whether kids are wasting their time on Facebook. It’s about the practice of statecraft. It’s about not simply ‘the decline of the book’, but the increasing import non-narrative thinking. It’s about the shift from scarcity to abundance, and its effect on everything from the media business to the practice of news. It’s the incredible opportunity in the fact that we can project part of our identities online, making the body but one part of who we are.
These are, on the one hand, exciting, abstract, mind-expanding ideas; on the other, they are very real signals about the direction culture is taking. And at its end, we are left with a simple question: where in the mainstream media of Canada’s largest and most important city are the optimistic readings of these facets of the coming digital future? Where are the writers willing to act as the intellectual and cultural counterweight to the idea that the internet, the smartphone and the tablet represent the corruption and demise of our literary, artistic and philosophical heritage?
For those who simply refuse to, consider this: In 1492, scholar Johannes Trithemius published In Praise of Scribes, a treatise on how a coming new technology that, while beneficial, would also rob of us a fundamentally human, almost spiritual experience that helped ‘illuminate our innermost soul’. That practice was manuscript writing. The newfangled gadget was the printed book.
Imagine, if in a generation or two, our descendents ask as why we, while the rest of the world rocketed ahead, made the same mistake as Trithemius: failing to understand that the new represented not a diminishing of what makes us human, but an expansion and deepening of our capacity to connect with, understand and reverence our world and the others in it. What answer will we give them? That in clinging to our moleskins, we simply did what we thought was right? Or would we, after decades of denial, tell them the truth: that we could not see the hope for the murky haze of fear.
