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Culture Voice: An introspective retrospective
Very soon, Culture Voice will be silent. And with that silence comes a time for me to look back at how much I enjoyed the random works of friends and strangers. But it also means that I will have a little more free time. And right now, I’m using that time to contemplate what — if anything — went wrong. You see, anytime something bad happens in life, I assume it was wrong, and that there must be a cause. Sometimes I’ll acquiesce, give up the existential search, and accept that God allows bad things happen to good people. But does God also stand by and watch bad things happen to good online journals? I guess so. But, still, I ask you, dear readers: what went wrong with Culture Voice?
Well, for starters, we lack a great number of readers. But why the low readership? That’s the real question I’m trying to ask. Was it poor marketing? Not enough foot soldiers shouting about the latest installment of Culture Voice? Were we too slow in obtaining a celebrity endorsement? Should I have asked my friend whose cousin is an Olympic ice dancer to emblazon Culture-Voice.com on her sequined mini-skirt?
One thought I’ve wrestled with concerns publication schedule: maybe people are too impatient to wait an entire week to see new material. I mean, with blogs monopolizing Internet readers’ attention, perhaps we failed to recognize society’s desire for NEW — as in, your article is two days old, as stale as David Spade’s… well, as stale as David Spade. And speaking of, even Mr. Spade’s Twitter feed garners way more followers than Culture Voice — another reason quantity over quality might be a factor in gaining readers.
But is the demise of Culture Voice because a week without new content leads to boredom, or because people think that reading causes boredom?
I once asked a colleague about the last book he read, and he said, “I don’t read books. The longest literature I ever read is probably a magazine article. Short ones, like ads.” I nodded, agreed that our culture is so distracted by the bustle of business and the clamor of fast-paced media and YouTube-style entertainment that reading has become an antiquated pastime reserved for grandparents and beach vacations.
To borrow from the old adage, people just don’t read anymore. And if they don’t read, how could there possibly be an audience for Culture Voice? Perhaps we were doomed from the beginning by a poor business plan: next time, we’ll just capture all our opinions in 45-second video clips and post them on social networking sites. Easy for the Daily Wad, not so much for questioning God’s gender. (But I’m sure even He would love to see that clip.)
Still, I’m not satisfied by blaming non-readers. I don’t think the success or failure of Culture Voice ever depended on the willingness of others to read, nor on our ability to gain those readers. I think the life of Culture Voice has hinged instead on a lack of certainty about what Culture Voice is, and what it was trying to accomplish.
Trying to define the “voice” of Culture Voice is as hard as trying to hear a voice crying in the wilderness. From one article to the next, from one week to the next, a reader could hardly predict what sort of tone the journal would take. For example, in one hand you have Michael Mulligan’s intensive “Defense of Nature Poetry” series, and in the other you have Gordon Gartrell’s scatological article, “For Shit’s Sake.” To be frank, when I saw those two works juxtaposed, I didn’t know if I should take both articles as serious scholarship, as satire, or as some combination thereof. I often wondered, if Mr. Mulligan really wanted people to read nature poetry, shouldn’t his essays have started with a defense of poetry in general? I mean, if people don’t read poetry — if, in fact, the majority of American society considers poetry irrelevant, boring, and annoying — then how can we expect them to fall in love with the most obnoxious of all poetry? So, maybe Mulligan’s Nature Poetry series (despite being a solid examination of some great nature poems) was all a hoax. Or, perhaps Gartrell’s analysis of the many uses of the word shit was a much more serious study of linguistics than I ever realized?
To be clear: I’m not trying to claim either Mulligan or Gartrell did a poor job writing their articles. I’m trying to bring to light a lack of common tone among our various contributors. Simply put, Mulligan’s essays targeted a different audience than Gartrell’s shitty article. And, of course, these two authors weren’t the only cooks bringing totally different ingredients to the kitchen.
So, is that the problem? Is that what went wrong? Did too many disparate voices speaking in unison drown out any attempts at creating a unifying voice?
For a while, I was feeling okay with this explanation. I thought I could live with it. But, I couldn’t stop wondering: maybe this confluence of competing voices was the beauty of Culture Voice. Perhaps I’ve never understood until now, at the end of the road, that Culture Voice was never meant to offer a single, unified voice: it was, rather, many different voices all clamoring for a bit of attention, all hoping someone will identify with and appreciate their individual point of view.
Maybe our little journal was not meant to be a singular voice speaking TO culture, but a collage of voices FROM culture. And if that is the case, then Culture Voice, though never destined for millions of readers, did capture the voice — or, rather, voices — of culture quite well.
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