The New Food Economy recently published a conversation by leading food journalists, Beyond #Foodporn, about raising the stakes for food writing:
This is a plea to get readers to be more intellectually curious. But on a larger scale, it’s a plea to the publishing industry to make food and food reporting think more systemically, to look beyond food as an object, and acknowledge it as a sector.
This question is right up my alley. At the University of Gastronomic Sciences I wrote my master’s thesis on using social media to craft a sustainable food system. I argued for paying attention to the architectures, assumptions, and priorities underlying major social media platforms that make them ill-suited to effect systematic change, and for pushing back against these. How can food system activists depict the unphotogenic, the mundane-but-important? How can we unspool complex stories that don’t inspire a knee-jerk emotional reaction? How can we prioritize solidarity over the profit motive, dignity and privacy over sensationalism?
Maybe it’s not by using Facebook, which is a tool designed and continually redesigned to increase our usage of Facebook, full stop. As Audre Lorde put it with such perfect force, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
A tool with no place on a permaculture farm. Source: deere.com.
The problem does not merely come down to sensationalism, to smartphones, or to short attention spans. It’s easy to cast this as a problem of narratives versus listicles, long-form pieces versus memes. This simplified argument comes easily to me, as it plays into my own aesthetics. It will surely come as no shock to anyone reading this website that I prefer words—many words, preferably those dreaded “walls of text”—to pictures.
Back in 2004, when I graduated from high school in San Diego and moved to Chicago for college, I was using two social networks: The Facebook (then open only to students at a fixed list of fancy private universities) and LiveJournal. I think wistfully, sometimes, about the world in which Facebook waned into obsolescence and the rambling, lengthy screeds and elaborate mood icons of LiveJournal carried the day. What would we have talked about instead of The Dress? Perhaps, without the near-compulsory use of real names and profile photographs, marginalized people would face marginally less reflexive harassment. Bernie, I’m fairly certain, would have won.
But of course I would feel this way. As a child I read compulsively, through car trips and meals and camping trips and family gatherings and long, long past bedtime, as my parents and grandparents still relate with fond resignation. It is only fairly recently that I have stopped scanning the ingredient lists of shampoo bottles every time I shower. I don’t mean to take on an air of superiority here. My motivations, insofar as I can articulate them in retrospect, were probably the same as those that lead others to play Candy Crush or scroll through Pinterest for hours—namely, disinclination to engage with the world before me or to be alone with my own thoughts. Substituting cozy, self-satisfied walls of text for flashy images doesn’t solve the problem.
Perhaps the task, then, is to craft communication tools that combat these disinclinations, that incentivize and support a deeper engagement with strange and challenging people and ideas.
I edited a book recently about gamification in higher education. It described how a small set of college professors—all, the author readily admits, middle-aged guys who used to play arcade games and now have tenure—try to draw on the qualities that make video games so absorbing in designing their curricula. One of the most promising aspects of gamification, according to this book, is lessening the sting of failure. When you die in a game, you don’t, in general, feel paralyzed by shame; rather, you are inspired to try again (and there is a structure that makes trying again the easiest course of action).
This holds promise. How can we make it more easy and appealing to try and fail, to reach out and be rebuffed, to fumble toward communication across gulfs of language and culture? We’ll need to examine not just the words we write and the pictures we take but the media through which we distribute them, seeking out platforms and architectures that mirror the world we want to create.