Is Toronto Technophobic?

[Karl Dubost]

FYI.

    Is Toronto Technophobic?
http://www.torontostandard.com/culture-design/is-techno-optimism-a-dirty-idea-in-toronto

    To walk through the streets of Toronto is to understand
    that this is a town enthralled by modern technology.
    Here, you’re more likely to see someone on an iPhone or
    a BlackBerry than you are reading a book or newspaper.
    Toronto consistently ranks among the top cities in the
    world in social media usage. Meanwhile, the city’s
    burgeoning tech scene grows from strength to strength,
    and Google themselves have scooped up three local
    startups in the past year alone. This much is clear:
    Torontonians are rushing headfirst into the digital age.

    And here is what I can almost guarantee you. Upon
    reading this, many of the writers, cultural commentators
    and other media of this city would wrinkle up their
    noses, as if they had just walked by an open sewer. They
    would quickly launch into diatribes on the importance of
    the printed word, the destruction of attention spans, or
    our damaging obsession with trite ephemera.

    That may be a slightly polemical exaggeration, but if
    it is, it’s not by much. If Toronto is saturated in
    technology, its media discourse on the subject is equal
    parts fearful and dismissive. Whether it’s cultural
    critics like Steven W. Beattie or Russell Smith
    lamenting the loss of book culture, or columnists like
    Christie Blatchford or Margaret Wente decrying the ‘mob
    mentality’ of the web, techno-scepticism appears to
    dominate Toronto’s chattering classes. Even the
    Standard’s own media critic Bert Archer recently wrote
    about how Twitter can be a useful thing during
    elections, which, though a fair thought, seemed a
    puzzling thing to say in 2011 when it has been argued
    elsewhere for years.

    And while not specifically Toronto media per se, it was
    also impossible to miss the significance of The Globe
    and Mail’s recent redesign. Arguably Canada’s most
    influential paper, the Toronto-based broadsheet’s
    “billion dollar bet on print” spoke volumes about this
    city’s approach to the coming digital revolution.

    What it is about Toronto that has made its media
    culture vaguely technophobic is a question I posed to
    Zunaid Khan. Khan is currently at online advertising
    venture Shiny Ads, but has worked in Toronto for years
    in getting established brands like Quebecor and NOW
    Magazine into new media. He argues that the problem is
    one of the city’s media culture and its deep ties to the
    past.

    “The traditional media companies in this country are
    conservative by nature,” he says. “They’re risk averse
    when it comes to technology, and tend to be more
    deliberate and slower-moving.” Part of that is obviously
    their sheer size. Yet, it’s also about the time it’s
    taking for the traditional media to accept that they are
    no longer the sole gatekeepers of information. “They’re
    being forced to change,” says Khan. “They’re not as
    dominant a medium as they once were, advertisers have
    many more options, and media consumption has changed as
    well.”

    This may be a situation then, where economics produces
    culture. As those in traditional media watch the
    shrinking of their business, they understandably express
    not only a defence of their models and structures, but
    also the values they represent, whether expertise, or
    the importance of long-form reading, to name but two.

    But it’s not as if the ways in which the web challenges
    those ideals is somehow unknown in Toronto. To the
    contrary, the city is littered with great events like
    Mesh, Future of Media or Hacks and Hackers, where ‘the
    new’ is discussed and often very optimistically. The
    issue is whether or not the more radical ideas presented
    by modern technology — like say data-as-journalism, or
    innovative ways to monetize the attention economy — are
    filtering through media circles from the top down.

    “There are a lot of people out talking about the need
    for media to adapt to new technology, and there are a
    lot great digital executives working in this town,” Khan
    says. “I just don’t know how many executives at the big
    media companies are getting it or whether the people who
    are trying to embrace digital media are getting access
    to the people making decisions.”

    If the people in charge are embracing digital only when
    necessary, perhaps it’s unsurprising that a culture of
    techno-scepticism filters through to the rank and file.
    Making matters worse is the comparative lack of
    competition in Canada after years of media
    consolidation, which relaxes the pressure to innovate.

    It’s not that a general sense of worry regarding
    technology is somehow unique to Toronto, of course. Just
    recently, former New York Times editor Bill Keller set
    off a storm of controversy when he suggested that
    Twitter makes you stupid and that Facebook replaces real
    social interaction (assertions thoroughly called into
    question by scholar Zeynep Tufekci). Similarly, some of
    the loudest critics of the web’s effect on our lives —
    Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Malcolm Gladwell — are
    based in the U.S. It’s something that’s happening
    everywhere, and is also perfectly natural and sensible.
    As we experience the beginning of what may well be the
    most profound intellectual and cultural change since the
    invention of movable type, a little trepidation is
    surely a good thing.

    But if that anxiety is one half of an equation of which
    a breathless tech boosterism is the other, then where is
    the latter in Toronto’s media? How frequently does one
    read the Toronto feature or cover story claiming, for
    example, that there are upsides to how our thinking may
    become more non-linear and algorithm-like, or that our
    approach to reading is changing? Why is techno-optimism
    a dirty idea in Hogtown?

    According to Rex Sorgatz, it’s partly to do with the
    degree of cross-pollination between the people in a city
    thinking about technology and those who think about
    culture in general. Sorgatz spent years wrangling with
    big media companies’ difficulty with the web, primarily
    as the executive producer of MSNBC.com. More recently
    though, he’s been an integral part of New York’s tech
    and media scene, maybe most famously now in his ongoing
    bet with Gawker chief Nick Denton about that company’s
    recent redesign.

    Even New York though, says Sorgatz, that looming
    spectre to which Toronto is so often unfavourably (and
    wrongly) compared, has its fair share of conservatism.

    “There’s such a fear of the new here,” he says. “I
    moved to New York from Seattle at about the time Twitter
    was taking off and I remember talking about it to
    friends who worked at media companies. They laughed and
    laughed. They thought it was so stupid.” In light of the
    service’s role in the recent Arab uprisings, it’s a
    perspective that hindsight makes look especially silly.

    It’s something that is changing, though. “Everyone now
    feels as if they now have to give something a chance,
    whereas before they’d say things like ‘why would I want
    to tell people I’m eating a sandwich?’”, argues Sorgatz,
    referring to the initial critique of Twitter. “For sure,
    the existence of Foursquare and Tumblr in New York has
    made it such that people feel as though they have to try
    things more.”

    Part of the shifting acceptance of technology is
    therefore about how closely intertwined the people
    making things that affect culture are to those who act
    as public interlocutors for that change. Perhaps then
    it’s that very lack of overlap that is Toronto’s
    trouble, as bookish, cultural critics largely stay far
    away from the tech scene and sometimes even the
    technology itself.

    It’s not at all that we should dismiss the concerns of
    those who are worried about such rapid, profound
    cultural shifts. But if a city’s culture is in part
    shaped by its artists, its writers and its
    intelligentsia, there is something unsettling about the
    idea that, particularly among that group, the promise
    and opportunity of the web for education, the liberal
    arts, social change and journalism should be regarded
    with such distrust and worry.

    After all, the more radical disruptions of the web go
    far beyond whether kids are wasting their time on
    Facebook. It’s about the practice of statecraft. It’s
    about not simply ‘the decline of the book’, but the
    increasing import non-narrative thinking. It’s about the
    shift from scarcity to abundance, and its effect on
    everything from the media business to the practice of
    news. It’s the incredible opportunity in the fact that
    we can project part of our identities online, making the
    body but one part of who we are.

    These are, on the one hand, exciting, abstract,
    mind-expanding ideas; on the other, they are very real
    signals about the direction culture is taking. And at
    its end, we are left with a simple question: where in
    the mainstream media of Canada’s largest and most
    important city are the optimistic readings of these
    facets of the coming digital future? Where are the
    writers willing to act as the intellectual and cultural
    counterweight to the idea that the internet, the
    smartphone and the tablet represent the corruption and
    demise of our literary, artistic and philosophical
    heritage?

    For those who simply refuse to, consider this: In 1492,
    scholar Johannes Trithemius published In Praise of
    Scribes, a treatise on how a coming new technology that,
    while beneficial, would also rob of us a fundamentally
    human, almost spiritual experience that helped
    ‘illuminate our innermost soul’. That practice was
    manuscript writing. The newfangled gadget was the
    printed book.

    Imagine, if in a generation or two, our descendents ask
    as why we, while the rest of the world rocketed ahead,
    made the same mistake as Trithemius: failing to
    understand that the new represented not a diminishing of
    what makes us human, but an expansion and deepening of
    our capacity to connect with, understand and reverence
    our world and the others in it. What answer will we give
    them? That in clinging to our moleskins, we simply did
    what we thought was right? Or would we, after decades of
    denial, tell them the truth: that we could not see the
    hope for the murky haze of fear.

--
Karl Dubost
Montréal, QC, Canada
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/