Message boards and Television Without Pity might as well have been phenomena of the 19th century, and the trail from the Jezebel comments section to The Hairpin to The Toast as remote as an ice shelf in the Arctic. To a roomful of 19-20 year olds, the titans of the blog era only just passed were also, for all intents and purposes, lost to them historically. But the second unsettling revelation of the course was that many of my students had never heard of these places to begin with. I assigned those memorials at the beginning of class to set an appropriately mournful tone and to spotlight the idea that the criticism we would read had been produced under labor conditions that were tremendously precarious and getting worse. What would it mean to acknowledge that sports are both bone-shakingly stupid and also the most important thing? Were these critics writing to you or talking to you? At what point did the jokes transmogrify into penetrating insights? When did this meandering conversation about memories of old baseball players turn into something poignant? And why would anybody have ever wanted this to stop?
It was a site that embraced the most maligned forms of internet writing (the listicle), as well as its most highly-regarded (the long read), and gave them energy in juxtaposition. They're still being written today about the ghost ship of Deadspin, a pristine example of what Gawker-founder Nick Denton once called "the good internet." To read Will Leitch or Katie Baker or David Roth or any of the murderers' row who'd cycled through there was to have an unmitigated experience of hope about what writing in the 21st century could be. These sites, at their peril, proved resistant to any notion of top-down control.Īnd since then, of course, there have been more obituaries. But even the most corporate of these platforms like Grantland and MTV News mercifully maintained the intimacy and over-sharing and critical closeness of the blogger. As Doyle rightly suggests, the true Blog Era ended in the late aughts and was replaced by sites like these that collated talent from platforms like blogspot but sought to pay their writers and give them some degree of institutional stability. As Sady Doyle (creator of the now-defunct feminist Tiger Beatdown blog) noted this week, appreciations of sites like these often loosely employ the word "blog." But these were largely not blogs, not in the traditional sense. These were not perfect sites, but they were spaces where wild and wooly takes could roam freely.
The causes of death were diverse but interrelated: lawsuit, creative difference, corporate buyout, pivot to video. Alex Shepherd and Max Krotov on the 2015 sinking of Grantland Max Read on Gawker's 2016 dismantling Bryan Curtis on the 2017 house-cleaning of MTV News Jia Tolentino on the 2018 collapse of The Awl empire. Alongside a suite of essays in defense of cultural criticism as a practice, students began the second week of the course with a parallel suite of essays eulogizing shut-down or stunted websites. I thought it would be a class about contemporary discourse, but it turned out to be a course about an historical period.Īnd so I began it with the obituaries. It was staggering to see how, without selecting for it intentionally, so many of the writers I assigned had written for publications that had since been shuttered or hollowed out.
I thought the course would be animated by the energy and immediacy of these writers instead, it was haunted by loss and decline. The class was supposed to signify a sense of boundless ramshackle possibility, both for me as a job candidate and for the critics who occupied my reading schedule.īut by the time I had an opportunity to teach it last year, the online critical sphere I hoped to illuminate for students had cratered spectacularly. Written nearly five years ago while I was applying for positions on the academic job market, the original syllabus outlined how a new and exciting form of cultural criticism - "the space betwixt and between the comments section and the little magazine," I wrote at the time - had arisen from the gargantuan yet idiosyncratic online networks of the twenty-first century, and along with it a new wave of public intellectuals, like Roxane Gay, Anne Helen Petersen, Jia Tolentino, Jenna Wortham, Molly Lambert, Alyssa Rosenberg, Hanif Abdurraqib, Scott Tobias, Ezekiel Kweku, and so many more.