Studies in arrogance.
Barry Diller’s perspective on blogging typifies the response of many a complacent media executive to the rise of blogging, according to Scott Rosenberg.
“Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,” he told The Economist in 2006. “Talent is the new limited resource.” At a technology conference that year, he declared, “There’s just not that much talent in the world, and talent almost always outs.”
Diller’s view echoes that of avowedly elitist polemics like Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur.” According to this perspective, talent is a resource of fixed supply. The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that’s spewing forth from the Web’s profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It’s just dross that obscures the real talent’s output.
Real Nietzschian supermen in the fields of journalism and political and social commentary don’t float to the top while maintaining a presence in the blogosphere, so if you’re ambitious you better get out of this guy’s cone of condescension and ditch the blogging.
In related news, Dan Froomkin, recently fired columnist for the Washington Post has been hired to be the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief.
plimfix 3:26 am on July 8, 2009 Permalink |
My own experience of why this thesis of limited talent is tosh comes from my time playing in a punk band. The bassist, bless him, was not very bright – that would be and was the intuitive view of most people who met him – wooden-headed, unimaginative, slow on the uptake. He had a BA degree. He’d have left school with zip – except he was privately educated, like so many of the British elite.