Iqra’i

I feel a bit of an obligation to call attention to David Brooks’ column from last Friday, not because it’s particularly novel but precisely because it isn’t — at least, not to anyone who read my exchange with Reihan on cultural capital, here and here. In fact, Brooks cited it accordingly (if vaguely), in a passage that reads extremely awkwardly in unlinked print:

[With the release of the iPhone,] media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status. Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Why the iPhone is the single catalyst for so seismic a shift is left unexplained, which is a shame. Brooks’ only major innovation over Reihan and me (other than the advice-column conceit, which is admittedly hilarious) is mapping our vague generalities onto a particular historical timeline — an innovation which would be much more welcome if the points on said timeline were justified rather than apparently arbitrary.

But Brooks’ additions are secondary; it’s the fact that his column exists at all that best proves its point (though I hope this was unintentional). It’s medium, not content, that determines who leads culture — which could be why the fact that these points were originally made by people other than Brooks is far less relevant than the fact that Brooks made them in a far more influential medium. But since the NYT isn’t as hip as a blog, Brooks’ audience doesn’t qualify as members of his “early rejecter” elite. This turns the entire column into a subtle tribute to the fringe bloggers who cultivate ideas for the media mainstream to farm, toiling in our elite obscurity, doomed to being “influential” — which as we know is a euphemism for “small potatoes”.