“[Media] is produced, these days, largely on and for the Internet, influenced in ways both major and petty by the forces of Facebook and Google. Journalists joke about the digital maw as a great, heaving beast: something that must be fed, something that both generates and feasts upon delicious, nourishing #content—Seymour’s carnivorous plant, basically, only hungrier and slimier and, quite often, angrier… As far as the Internet is concerned, the tastiest content of all, the content that gets top play in Facebook's and Google's algorithms, is the content that is timely—the stuff that is, somehow, pegged to the news of the world. A big news event, The Awl's John Hermannnoted last year, "generates an enormous surplus of attention, much more than news can meet."…
Definitions of the take, as a journalistic form, vary widely—the term can be used neutrally—but many of them involve some side-eye. Some generally-agreed-upon characteristics: The take is usually argumentative. It is often alarmist. It is almost always pegged to a big news story that everyone—or a vocal chunk of everyone—is talking about. It takes advantage of the attention that has coalesced around a particular event—be it leaked celebrity photos(privacy! the digital panopticon! sexism!) or the announcement of a new wearable technology (privacy! intimacy! commercialized jerkiness!) or the confirmation of another Clinton candidacy (dynasty! ageism! sexism!), or the hospitalization-if-not-death of Joni Mitchell—and exploits that event on the grounds of a Greater Message…
Usually, this is fine. (Again: takes —> ideas —> progress!) Where things go awry, though, is when the writing of a take provides an excuse to privilege ideas over facts… Passionate arguments about just-breaking stories—the details of which we don't yet, by definition, know—on cable news and their websites. The rise of the phrase "if true"—as if the truth is a mere inconvenience that shouldn't be allowed to interrupt a good argument. Et cetera.”
Takes are, like, everything I read. Everything. Everything everything. And thinking about it in this way, I can recognize when I sort of discovered and became addicted to ‘internet takes’ and how I developed sorting systems – and then developed new sorting systems – for identifying which were worth reading and thinking about and discussing. I’m always in the process of developing a really intense philosophy about what ‘takes’ to read, and then folding on that philosophy because I find the exceptions.
I think some piece of modern internet-consumption-maturity is developing a sense of what you value in this content, and determining how to identify it. Sorting the Takes.
Also, I’m glad to see a bunch of articles recently with a general theme of concern about Takes and the sort of targeting of people and stories that can happen (like, all the stuff about shaming on the internet). Partially because I totally write in Take-format and I need some better influences.
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