The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Examining Mailer in a Time of Split-focus — or, What the Internet Cannot Do for Us

Written by
Tracy Dahlby

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Abstract: Norman Mailer’s method of journalism illustrates how to extend the quality and scope of journalistic inquiry into the future of a troubled tradition. In examining Lee Harvey Oswald, Mailer produces a book that is long, intricately built and absorbing, if in places marred by familiar bits of Mailer’s hyper-rational exuberance. What is particularly noteworthy at this time of media upheaval are the tips Mailer’s method offers students and other aspiring investigators about how to extend the quality and scope of journalistic inquiry into the future of a troubled tradition.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03dah

Introduction: Entering a World of Epistemology-Lite

We are at a crossroads in America today in determining the extent to which we nourish our public discourse on the bounty of information available on the Internet or the Internet feeds on us. The accelerated decline of traditional print media is redefining forms of understanding that once obliged us to earn meaning about issues important to ourselves and our communities the old-fashioned way: by reading about them, substantively, from the printed page. Today, studies suggest, life online is propelling us (and particularly our young) into a world wags refer to as epistemology-lite where we may still make the effort to stay in the know but do so by skimming, not reading for depth, and routinely end our Web-based truth-seeking on any given topic, somewhat less than intrepidly, by clicking on the first few Google hits we come to.

Norman Mailer saw the handwriting on the digital wall. In 2005, he told a Manhattan audience that he felt “the woeful emotions of an old carriage-maker as he watched the disappearance of his trade before the onrush of the automobile.” The electronic media, namely commercial television, he suggested, had sapped even the thoughtful reader’s enthusiasm for taking the serious novel, or anything else for that matter, really seriously. “Indeed how many of you, even in this audience,” Mailer asked the crowd at the Marriott in Times Square, “do not obtain more pleasure from a review of a good novel in the New York Times than from the ardors involved in reading that good, but serious book?” (Those of us at home are now free to lower our hands.) While the Internet has emerged as destroyer-in-chief (or co-opter-in-chief, in the view of the optimists) of earlier media epistemologies, today’s digital shift puts the future of serious works of both fiction and nonfiction in question across a broad front, and with it, Mailer observed, the “insights with which good readers can enrich themselves” and expand their “comprehension of society.”

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Works Cited

• Kee, Tameka (April 7, 2008). "Get Your Assets on First Three Pages of Search, Or Else". Online Media Daily. MediaPost Communications. Retrieved 2009-04-19.
• Mailer, Norman (2008). "Acceptance Speech for National Book Foundation Award". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 219–220. Retrieved 2021-06-23.
• Nichols, John; McChesney, Robert W. (March 18, 2009). "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers". The Nation. Web. Retrieved 2009-04-18.
• Patterson, Thomas E. (July 10, 2007). "Young People and News" (PDF). Harvard Kennedy School. Harvard University. Retrieved 2009-04-12.