Why Medium Matters
In a world filled with pictures and movies - and getting more so every day - words matter. In fact, they matter even more.
A few weeks ago, Cliff Watson (you can find him here on Twitter) wrote a great post about teenagers and their relationship to social networks. I’ll leave the hand-wringing and the Xanax-popping to the Facebook shareholders and advertisers (For the record, I am neither) over the findings in the Piper Jaffray study, but there’s one thing that seems to stick out in my mind about Cliff’s piece: it’s the nature of the networks/apps kids are gravitating to. And us grown-ups as well.
Instagram, Snapchat, Kik and others are geared to the idea of sharing photos. Vine’s raison d’etre is super-short videos. And of course, Facebook bought Instagram because of its mobile nature as well as its photo orientation. I realize Kik may not be as visually oriented as the others, so perhaps it’s more closely related to Twitter, which is also about saying very little to say a lot.
So I was quite glad to see Lauren Indvik wrote this at Mashable about our online platforms:
If the first generation of self-publishing platforms best served serious writers, the second generation of self-publishing platforms — think Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram — have favored those whose messages come in the form of 140-character statements, images and GIFs.
If you take a step back and think about the way the web and online publishing have evolved, it’s like we’ve all become digital cavepeople in the past 10 years. Or, as Umair Haque would say, “techno-serfs” where we slavishly share and overshare everything going on in our lives, what we see, what we hear, and what we think. We share our cave drawings on Snapchat, Instagram and Tumblr. We show the world we discovered the wheel and fire on Vine. In a world where everyone scrambles to build platforms around pictures and videos, the words to describe those pictures and videos is king. Context matters.
I’ve only recently starting putting my thoughts on virtual parchment here at Medium, but I must say it is a very cozy place to do so. Evan says that “Medium is a beautiful space for reading and writing — and little else.” I must say he is quite right. From the easy-to-use, stripped down interface, to the little collection of posts that are part of the “About Medium” collection where there’s a lot of care and attention paid to helping you, the writer, write good things (I mean, a Medium style sheet? Love it.). And the collaborative functionality lets me unleash my inner spelling and grammar autocrat on my friends’ posts. It’s really quite brilliant when you put it all together.
But ultimately, a place like Medium is a reprieve from the nanosecond refreshing of feeds of tweets, pictures, videos, and memes. And if you just think I’m talking about social networks here, I’m not. For all the things journalism may or may not have been, one thing that has been essential to quality reporting is the ability to tell a story. With words.
If the world of journalism is hurtling to a mash-up of Buzzfeed cat videos, Business Insider slideshows, assorted collections of chart porn and HuffPo… well, I don’t know what you’d call HuffPo, it leads to me ask one question: What will this list look like in 10 years? Or this list? What about in 20 years? Or will anyone notice? How will we tell our children or our grandchildren what we saw? What we felt? What was it like to live in this day and age? How will they tell their children and grandchildren what it was like in their lifetime? Doesn’t seem so trivial now, does it?
So you see, to me what we’re seeing unfold in a place like Medium is crucial. If people are to have a place where they can think, create and express, that means we should all be giving a damn about giving them room to spread their wings in that context. We’re only going to have a society of cogent people if we give them the room to practice being cogent. Spend 2 minutes on Facebook and tell me if you see that happening over there.
I really hope this place stays around. For a long time.
