The readers strike back

Massive online feedback has rocked writers and changed journalism forever. This brave new world is filled with beautiful minds and nasty Calibans and everything in between. Its benefits are undeniable. But do they outweigh its insidious effects?

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Internet, Journalism, Writing, Letters to the Editor, Gary Kamiya, Opinion

Jan. 30, 2007 | You, gentle and not-so-gentle readers, have been on my mind lately. You vast and invisible online throng, slouched in front of thousands of computer monitors, have done something revolutionary. You have forever altered the relationship between writer and audience. The Internet has turned what was once primarily a one-way communication into a dialogue -- or maybe a melee. From a cultural perspective, the new democracy of voices online is a wonderful thing. But writers have an odd and ambiguous relationship with their readers, and the reader revolution is having massive consequences we can't even foresee. Writers are being pulled, or lured, down from their solitary perches and into the madding throng. This has opened useful debate and made writers accountable. But it has also thrown open the gate to creeps, narcissists and wannabe Byrons who threaten to damage the fragile, half-permeable membrane writers use to keep the world from being too much with them.

This is all brand new. Until the Internet came along, actual readers barely dented a writer's consciousness. Before the whole world got wired, the only way readers could respond to a piece was by writing a letter to the editor, or (much less frequently) to the author, putting it in a stamped envelope, and sticking it in a mailbox. As a result, the number of letters was a tiny fraction of what it is in the age of e-mail. And that number was further diminished by an editor who trimmed the few selected letters to meet space considerations and winnowed out the cranks. An article might have been read by 10,000 people, but the writer never knew it. A dozen letters constituted a deluge.

Most writers have a love-hate relationship with reader mail. I'm no exception. When I started out, back in the snail-mail days, I looked eagerly forward to getting letters -- as long as they compared my prose to Stendhal's. However, I was quickly disabused of the dream that I was destined to be the literary version of Santa Claus. For every letter that compared my prose to Stendhal's, there were 10 that were the epistolary equivalent of a decaying vegetable, hurled with unerring accuracy at my cranium. (Actually, since no one was ever deluded enough to compare my prose to Stendhal's, the ratio was even worse.) This would have bummed me out, but there weren't enough letters, good or bad, to affect me one way or the other. Since there was no evidence that I had any readers -- and considering some of the publications I wrote for, that may have been true -- I was able to put my audience pretty much out of my mind.

Then Al Gore invented the Internet and everything changed. Pieces that in the olden days would have garnered five or six letters suddenly inspired more commentary than a rerun of "Gilligan's Island" in a cultural studies class. The floodgates opened, and in charged the masses -- some filled with fulsome praise, others waving scimitars and dragging siege machinery into place, others ranting about their ex-wives.

For its part, Salon has thrown in its lot, for better and worse, with reader democracy. Until about 15 months ago, readers could post comments only by e-mail, and Salon editors culled the most interesting and representative ones -- in effect, a compromise between the restrictive old print approach and the open-the-floodgates Web one. No more. Now readers can post letters directly and they go up on the site unedited. (We do remove posts that contain gratuitous insults, ad hominem attacks, obscenities and the like.)

Like most sites that have gone to an open letters forum, we wanted to democratize, to showcase all the letters we receive. We also did it because we wanted to attract more readers. Online journalism is a highly competitive business. Major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are competing with popular blogs like Daily Kos and established Web sites like Salon for readers. Salon editor in chief Joan Walsh says, "We talked for years about how to get the great letters from readers we all had in our in boxes onto the site and finally set out to do it. But clearly there was also the influence of the blogosphere, where readers expect to participate in the conversation and respond to posts and articles themselves. And we wanted to increase our page views, reader participation and loyalty. Readers come back now not just to see what else we've posted on Salon, but to see what other letter writers have said about their letter."

Salon's new letters policy is a tiny part of a larger online trend toward massive reader feedback. All of us -- writers and editors and readers alike -- are still struggling to get used to this cacophonous cornucopia of communication. It is a brave new world, filled with beautiful minds and nasty Calibans and everything in between. Its benefits are undeniable. But it has some downsides, too -- not all of them obvious.

Let's start with the good news. Ideas and perspectives that never found an outlet before are now shouted from every corner that has a phone line and a computer. This has rocked the journalistic world. The violent uprising of the previously voiceless plebeians has disturbed the perfumed slumber of media gatekeepers, forcing journalists to immediately correct glaring mistakes or abandon insupportable positions. One well-known example was the brouhaha at the Washington Post over its Jack Abramoff coverage, when readers posting on the Post's blog forced ombudsman Deborah Howell to admit that her assertion that Abramoff had "directed' contributions to both parties" -- implying that the Abramoff scandal was bipartisan -- was a mistake. The Post, whose initial response to the attacks on Howell was to shut down its blog on the grounds that many attacks were abusive, later, to its credit, restored the blog.

And, of course, there has been an explosion of expertise. The information revolution has set off a million car bombs of random knowledge at once, spraying info fragments through the marketplace of ideas. Sometimes it feels as if the Internet has turned the whole country, indeed the whole world, into a virtual New York City, a dense, antimatter-like place where within any four-block grid there are hundreds of people who know more about Miles Davis or Linux or Giorgio de Chirico or the Ruy Lopez opening or Peyton Manning's attack on the two-deep zone than you do. (As a starry-eyed provincial, I like to think of New York this way, even though it's probably an illusion.)

The reader revolution has also provided an unprecedented snapshot of America. Anyone who surfs the Web looks out over democratic vistas that Walt Whitman could only imagine. The switchboard is lit up and behind each light is a real human being whose opinions and interests can now be heard by all. Is this a good thing? It depends on whether your commitment to democracy, transparency and openness outweighs your desire not to be flooded with noise about Paris Hilton, Brazilian bikini waxing and the profiles on MySpace.

In some ways, this debate, and indeed the larger argument about the reader revolution, recapitulates venerable debates, which go back to the ancient Greeks, about the virtues of democracy versus aristocracy and oligarchy. This is an age of massive feedback, but it's hard to deny that the collective American mind, now that its amp is turned up to 11, sounds a lot like Mötley Crüe.

For a writer, this huge, suddenly vocal audience has some significant advantages. For one thing, it serves as an enormous fact-checker. If you make a mistake in a piece, some eagle-eyed reader will let you know, often within minutes. But a far more important effect of the reader revolution is that it has forced writers to immediately deal with substantive arguments and critique. Like most writers who publish a lot online, I've written pieces that a letter writer has sliced up so surgically, with such superior logic and style, that I began searching furtively for a "do over" button on my computer. And the sheer quantity of even less sophisticated arguments, like water poured onto a leaky roof, reveal a piece's weak points. Many writers have told me about extraordinary e-mail exchanges with readers that sometimes develop into ongoing relationships.

At its best, then, the active audience sharpens thinking and advances the discussion. Even when not at its best, it gives a valuable sense of the range of perspectives that are out there -- at least in the possibly skewed demographic of those who write letters online.

And, of course, for a writer there is the guilty narcissistic pleasure, which can become an addiction, of wallowing in what other people have to say about you. If you have a blog, as New York Times media writer David Carr noted recently, this temptation is even more powerful. In the Balzacian -- some would say baboonlike -- game of status-affirmation that we are all tempted to play from time to time, the number of letters you get, blogs that deal with you, or the number of times your name comes up on Google is an index of higher rank.

These are some of the good, or at least furtively pleasurable, aspects of the reader revolution. But there are also a number of bad ones. And like an iceberg, the bulk of them may be below the surface.

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