The Really BIG Mo
Before that, newspapers had a run of several centuries during which they were the only portal. Funny thing is, the few great newspapers still, in terms range of sources and resources, and in terms of writing and editing, are the best portals. (The only problem is, the print editions are not clickable.) The list of papers which attempt to cover the world--not just for breaking news but for culture in the broadest sense--is quite short: The Times in London, Le Monde in Paris, Die Zeit in Germany, plus three American papers. While it is true that the Washington Post excels in political coverage, and the Los Angeles Times bests everyone for movies, television, pop music and popular culture, no paper tries) to get it all down in print in well-written, well-edited words in the way the New York Times (NYT) does. Often slow on the uptake, certainly not free of bias and prejudice, NYT comes as close as any newspaper has in this imperfect world to capturing the immediacy of human culture day after day. While the Internet is already indispensable for anyone who is trying to track cultural and technological developments, so too is NYT. The editors and writers, working out of a long tradition of carefully practiced editorial judgment, not only pick and choose what goes in the paper and what stays out every day. They also give everything that winds up in the paper a rough ranking for importance: some stories get big headlines and a lot of space. Other stories get medium headlines and space, and others only a brief mention. Elsewhere in Magellan's Log 8, you'll find a graph we recently worked up showing the exponential curve of the number of patents granted since 1836 by the U.S. Patent Office. In the last quarter century the curve has turned sharply upward. Only eight years were required for the most recent million patents. It's vivid representation of the explosion of technology. We could do lots of other similar curves. For example, people look at the United States and think movies, pop music, sports (and guns--but that's another story). There's another curve just like that patent curve showing money spent for tickets to opera and symphony performances. That curve is also exponential (trivia detail: few people realize that Americans spend more to attend opera and symphony concerts than to attend ALL sporting events, baseball, football, NBA, everything). Momentum. Or, as George Bush père referred to it in a failed presidential campaign: the Big Mo. We tend to think the momentum is technological, because the new and improved gadgets just keep on coming and making our lives either simpler or more complicated (first there was the VCR to be programmed, which was only a warm-up for the delights of computer malfunction that Microsoft has bestowed on us). The momentum is in fact across the board: technology, science, the arts, the economy, politics. If you frequent any of the big Internet portals, you get at least a fair glimpse of it. But nowhere can you see it in something like its full rush as you can in the daily pages of the NYT. Some days are ho-hum, when not much seems to be happening. But those days are becoming less and less common (the curve is exponential). More and more frequently, you start through the paper in the morning and on page after page through all sections you are brought up short by some new development. The most recent such day was Thursday, January 6, 2000. It was such a startling edition that it shocked me out of my post-Y2K slumber and caused these thoughts to crystallize. How big is Mo these days? Nobody knows. But a gander at a few of the stories in the 01-06-00 Times can lead only to the conclusion that we're living in the Mother of all Mo's:
Creativity across the human spectrum of thinking and acting: that's what's driving the markets, and everything else, now. Have we perhaps made some kind of social quantum leap? Are we like the little electron that chugs along with no apparent change as energy pours into the atom, but when the energy reaches a certain level, the electron instantly jumps to a higher orbit--and a new life? END The photo is from the New York Times 1-1-2000 collection. |
