Well, I am under 30. And I am overwhelmingly self-absorbed, narcissistic, and juvenile. So he’s got me dead to rights there. But, being narcissistic, I also don’t think I lack the intellectual wherewithal to challenge Lazare:
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Which would be… what’s the word… dumb. Unless you wanted to get out of covering advertising. Is this a cry for help?
By which I mean advertising isn’t an industry that rewards voluntary ignorance of popular media. If you want to be a classical Latin scholar, you’re within your rights to ignore Facebook etc. for as long as you want. If you write about advertising for a living, you’re kind of obligated to get over yourself if you want to have the first clue about the industry that you’re professionally required to understand, especially since online advertising is pretty much the future and the question of whether that embryonic market will eventually be able to support media as we know it is basically the most profound question for anyone in the field, whether he or she is in sales, editorial, or production.
And I’ve read plenty of apocalyptic media analysis–Benjamin, George W.S. Trow, McLuhan. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to put the Fear in me at this point.
Some people are born dumb; some have it forced upon them; some people, like Lewis Lazare, choose dumbness. As I read in a book once, so it goes.
You hear this a lot in DC, folks bragging that they really know how to “read” a newspaper. It’s a tremendous indictment of the way newspapers are written, that you need to train yourself to correctly understand them. The information exists, of course, but it needs to be extracted and re-processed.
