Lately I’ve been wondering whether people are becoming less aware of the fact that they live in a society populated by lots of other people. I pondered this question a few weeks ago, when a group of teenagers insisted on talking through an entire movie, and last night when the brazen jaywalkers on Central Avenue dared me to hit them with my car. And I found myself pondering it again during a recent trip to the grocery store. It was extremely busy, and for some reason the woman walking directly in front of me felt the need to narrate the entire experience into her cell phone. “Boy, it’s really crowded,” she observed, as she charted a meandering path through the aisle that made it impossible to pass her on the right or left. “You can barely move in here.” Nothing this woman said was untrue, but she seemed oblivious to the fact that she was part of the problem. I wished she shared the attitude of my friend Scott, who refused to talk to me the other night because I contacted him when he was on the bus. “It’s too public,” he explained, speaking in a whisper.
Then I rounded the corner, where I immediately hit a blockade: four or five people, gabbing away in the produce aisle. They appeared to be old friends who had just happened to run into each other. I was happy for them, but I marveled at their total lack of awareness. Didn’t these people realize they were standing in an aisle being used by scores of shoppers? Apparently not. So I did what I sometimes do in these situations: I walked into them. Not very forcefully — I didn’t knock them over or anything like that. I just kind of gently stumbled into their little circle. They looked a little startled, but they promptly out of the way. “Oh, we’re blocking the aisle,” one of them said. “Sorry.”
Now, you might be wondering why I didn’t just say “Excuse me,” or something like that. Well, that’s a strategy I often employ, with varying degrees of success. But on those rare occasions when nobody’s paying attention to anything, and it’s really loud and crowded, I like to take a more dramatic course of action. Kind of like at a rock concert, where aggressively pushing your way through throngs of people is perfectly acceptable — indeed, it’s recommended, if you actually want to see the band and hear the music. And besides, saying excuse me does not always work. I learned this one evening at The Daily Grind, when I needed to get to the counter but a table of four was blocking my way. “Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me.” At that point, I’d had enough. I attempted to plow through, smashing into everyone’s chairs in the process. “Oh, we’re sorry,” they said, pulling in their chairs. “We’re in the way.” That’s the beauty of the walking-into-people strategy — if you do it properly, people will apologize to you.
Hmmm. Now that I read this thing, my behavior sounds kind of obnoxious. Perhaps I’m part of the problem, too. So I’d like to emphasize that I hardly ever walk into people, and only as a last resort. Although I do think that people have some responsibility to recognize that they’re blocking a public corridor. I mean, have you noticed the people who like to stop and chat in doorways? Do these people realize that they’re standing in a doorway? Why should I have to point that out? And don’t even get me started on the people who talk so loudly I can hear them all the way across a room.
THE COLLAPSE OF NEWSPAPERS, CONT.
These are interesting times for newspapers, to say the least. Just this week, the Hearst-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last print edition, and announced that it would continue to operate as a scaled-back web-only publication. Whether this will be successful, I can’t really say. The new SeattlePI.com will have an editorial staff of about 20, down from about 150. With such a sharply reduced staff, the website won’t be unable to duplicate the reporting of the print edition. Of course, it’s not trying to. From what I’ve read, the website will feature a lot of links to other sites, and more writing by community bloggers. There’s a place in the world for this sort of thing, but it doesn’t make up for the loss of information that results when a newspaper closes.
In a case of excellent timing, my old Birmingham Post-Herald colleague Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, now an economist at Princeton University, just completed a study, “Do Newspapers Matter?” looking at the impact of the closure of the Cincinnati Post in 2007. (That market is now served by one newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer). Sam found that next year fewer candidates ran for municipal office, incumbents were more likely to win and voter turnout declined. All fairly interesting and provocative stuff, and I hope Sam continues his research. You can find the study here.
The week’s other interesting journalism essay is by Clay Shirky. (You can find it here.) It presents a pretty bleak view of the present, but I actually found it fairly comforting. Shirky believes we’re living through a media revolution similar to the chaotic period that preceded the invention of the printing press: People are aware that there’s a problem, but nobody has developed a viable solution. “There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke,” Shirky writes.
I had always hoped that the transition to a new model of doing journalism would be orderly. Alas, it is not. But what I understand after reading Shirky’s piece is that I’m living through a revolution. Which is pretty exciting, when you think about. And also, of course, a little terrifying.
Got a comment? Add one below or e-mail me at sfoss@dailygazette.net.
