The Committee to Nuke Elysium

All of which brings me to the notion of audience. Back in the days of old, when print was king, we would speak of “reaching an audience”. We would talk of doing these things via advertising, or appearances – which were when you’d show up somewhere in the real world, deface books with ink and communicate using small mouth noises. What we meant by “reaching an audience” was “devising ways in which we force strangers to give us their money in exchange for ideas and maybe a joke or two”. This has changed in fairly savage ways. The complex net of processes designed to take your money and give it to me is kind of ragged, what with newspapers collapsing and the concept of authority being passed from journalists to the BoingBoing crew to, in 2009, a Twitter post from the sainted Stephen Fry. It was great to get a review in a music paper (remember those?) and it was amusing to see Oprah recommending Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to housewives, but here’s the new audience mediation: Stephen Fry popping up on your bloody iPhone to tell you he’s enjoying reading The Watchmen graphic novel.