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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Russ Smith and Ellen Willis

the breakfast table
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from: Ellen Willis

The Online Buffet

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999, at 12:31 PM ET

Russ,

Apparently you are a morning person. I'm not--I have to stumble out of bed, have coffee, sit around reading the papers--or if it's my turn go into town to get them first, no home delivery up here. Hopefully something in the paper will stimulate a little adrenalin (not much luck this week; last time I did one of these things I had Kosovo to write about). Only then can I begin to face such questions as ... What do I think of Slate? Well, first, my relationship to Slate, Salon too, has been much more like my relationship to a restaurant than to any print publication. I go there occasionally, sample whatever looks interesting, often because somebody has mentioned a piece to me ("you should try the ..."). It's like my relationship to the rest of the Web, actually, casual and uncommitted, without intense expectations about what ought to be there or any necessity, as with newspapers and magazines I read regularly, to see what Slate has to say about X. Plus, there's much too much stuff to do anything like read a whole "issue." I didn't subscribe to it when you had to pay. I might now, just because it's become more prominent in the public conversation, and if I did have to pay I might pay closer attention to it in the interest of getting my money's worth.

But I'm not sure Slate's "professionalism" is an asset. What most interests me about online journalism is it's so much looser and more serendipitous. As a writer, I'm intrigued by this e-mail dialogue form. It's less like writing a piece than like participating in a panel discussion, only allowing me to do what I can't in a panel discussion--express myself as well as I can in writing. I like the idea of talking to people I don't usually get to talk to, at least where they can talk back. Re: Kinsley himself, he is a conventional "high journalist," as I think of them; in my view it would be a public service if all the commentators on the Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and the New Republic would simply merge into one composite columnist who would write once a week so I could find out what the latest conventional wisdom is without having to spend so much time at it.

What I meant in saying that techno has cultural-political significance is that it's the medium of a counterculture; techno fans are looking for ecstasy (I mean the state of mind, not the drug, though that too), for a kind of erotic communalism that's basically missing from the larger culture right now ... but where the '60s counterculture was anti-technological (even though rock 'n' roll was totally dependent on technology), this one resonates with the techno-utopianism of computer freaks (I'm not saying the techno audience is computer freaks or overlaps with them, I really have no idea, just that there's a common impulse there). And this is what makes pop music, or popular culture of any kind, compelling: that it becomes the catalyst for a new oppositional and/or competing sensibility--it holds out the possibility of seeing life and art and the relation between them in some fresh way. Whereas rock 'n' roll in its various forms just seems to be rehashing and cannibalizing the past.

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819
from: Ellen Willis

The Online Buffet

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999, at 12:31 PM ET
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Russ Smith is the editor in chief and owner of New York Press, the Manhattan weekly he founded in 1988. He writes the column "Mugger" for the paper. Ellen Willis directs the cultural journalism program at New York University. Her latest book, Don't Think, Smile! Notes on a Decade of Denial will be published this fall.
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