In Silicon Valley people are obsessed with social media and love the idea of sharing even the most random snippet of information — be it the duration of your morning run or how much kale you bought at Whole Foods.
What's in it for the respective companies is obvious: data. Data has become not only an economic but a value system of sorts. Employees at big companies are encouraged to comment on their workplace — favourably, of course — on social media sites. This may be all very well as a business model, but if applied to journalism it is a shallow, even futile attempt to make topics "sexy" that by their very nature are not. (Surely there's nothing frumpier than the pretence of sexiness.)
What subtle allure bookishness still has I noticed a few weeks ago in Frankfurt — home of Goethe and the book fair. I had just got back from Palo Alto and found myself sitting on a panel in the Literaturhaus, a grand old riverside building. Still jetlagged, blonder and more tanned than my usual self, I felt like a Californian interloper among the other German critics discussing the latest novels. I was humbled by being offered the privilege to speak, having nothing to offer but my opinion on a couple of books.
I don't miss much about my country of birth when I live somewhere else. But what I always long for is this particular brand of intellectual outlook, one that actually makes people come out on a Monday night and pay to spend two hours listening to critics talk about books. However, this is not a nostalgic feeling, as once was the case for writers and thinkers in exile, longing for the language and culture of their childhood.
In my case, there's little melancholy about it; I just wish we'd find a way of preserving this sentiment and make it sustainable in the future. After all, it was the impulse that helped Germany to grow out of its benighted past: a modern form of enlightenment provided, day by day, by newspapers. It would be an irreversible mistake if it were diluted by the glib call for more entertainment and a more pedestrian version of what's new and important. We shouldn't be content with mere "content".
What's in it for the respective companies is obvious: data. Data has become not only an economic but a value system of sorts. Employees at big companies are encouraged to comment on their workplace — favourably, of course — on social media sites. This may be all very well as a business model, but if applied to journalism it is a shallow, even futile attempt to make topics "sexy" that by their very nature are not. (Surely there's nothing frumpier than the pretence of sexiness.)
What subtle allure bookishness still has I noticed a few weeks ago in Frankfurt — home of Goethe and the book fair. I had just got back from Palo Alto and found myself sitting on a panel in the Literaturhaus, a grand old riverside building. Still jetlagged, blonder and more tanned than my usual self, I felt like a Californian interloper among the other German critics discussing the latest novels. I was humbled by being offered the privilege to speak, having nothing to offer but my opinion on a couple of books.
I don't miss much about my country of birth when I live somewhere else. But what I always long for is this particular brand of intellectual outlook, one that actually makes people come out on a Monday night and pay to spend two hours listening to critics talk about books. However, this is not a nostalgic feeling, as once was the case for writers and thinkers in exile, longing for the language and culture of their childhood.
In my case, there's little melancholy about it; I just wish we'd find a way of preserving this sentiment and make it sustainable in the future. After all, it was the impulse that helped Germany to grow out of its benighted past: a modern form of enlightenment provided, day by day, by newspapers. It would be an irreversible mistake if it were diluted by the glib call for more entertainment and a more pedestrian version of what's new and important. We shouldn't be content with mere "content".
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