As I’ve mentioned before, I am a huge fan of This American Life. I used to listen it during my long drives across the US, whether it was driving back to Washington after hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire or traveling back to Ann Arbor after spending the weekend in Chicago. It’s been a staple of life for years, and after I moved to the UK, I started listening online, especially after they started doing podcasts this year.
Suw has quickly become a big fan, and we now often listen to the show on weekends over breakfast. Yesterday, we listened to the latest episode “Quiz Show“. The second of three acts was about MIT Mystery Hunt. As the show notes says:
Every winter, some of the world’s best puzzle solvers gather in Boston for the MIT mystery hunt, a competition in which teams of puzzle enthusiasts spend between 24 and 72 straight hours trying to solve what just may be the hardest recreational puzzles in the world.
I’m not really much of a puzzle person, but Suw and I both related to the slightly obsessive collectors of knowledge (some would say trivia) that made up these puzzle teams. I’m a geek, happily a pretty well adjusted geek as my friend Vicky says, but I wave my geek flag high. One of the members of the Dr. Awkward team (palindrome, as they were quick to note) was a guy named Dave. At a previous job, Dave had been told by his mentor that his colleagues were uncomfortable because he used too many literary allusions in his casual speech. People were complaining.
Dave was a bit baffled, but made a note of the things that he would have said over the next week. Then having lunch with former co-workers, he was asked a question about monkeys and chimps in which he went on a this painfully long exposition about the differences between apes, monkeys and prosimians. He had done a report on it when he was nine-years-old, and it was a personal obsession of his. His colleague said, “Yeah, Dave, speaking of animals, would you like to see the rat’s ass that I give.” Dave had an aha moment:
Ohh, that’s my problem. I inform people against their will.
Lisa Pollack, the producer narrating the piece, said that Dave and other puzzle solvers like him had found the context where they could shine, a place where their skills were best put to use and appreciated.
Suw and I both had those moments in life, where we found our peer group. For me, it was when I went from a small country school where I was the class geek to the Auburn Academy, a magnet school in an inner-city high school. Suw found the peer group in blogging and Joi Ito’s IRC channel a few years ago. We found a place where our slightly geeky skills were appreciated and where we weren’t ostracised for our intellectual curiosity.
It also made me think slightly about my day job as a journalist. I don’t want to go too much into that, that’s what our other blog Strange Attractor is for, but really, sometimes journalists ‘inform people against their will’. We like to think we know what people should know, but we forget that people don’t always respond well to being told what is important. They have their own issues an concerns. Sometimes, I’m sure that when journalists get too high on their horses, people just say: “Yeah, would you like to see the rat’s ass I give”.
It will probably not surprise you to learn that I also greatly enjoy “This American Life.” It may also not surprise you to learn that I have participated in a few MIT Mystery Hunts. In fact, I was on that same palindrome team for my first one in 1997. My officemate in grad school was a big puzzle person – wrote for Games magazine in her spare time. Like the folks described in the article, we loved the challenge of solving, and the aha moments. In fact, after we won, my officemate founded her own splinter team simply because she’d rather solve the puzzles than run the Hunt.
But it’s funny – it’s the obsession with trivia and the obsessive collectors of it that I found difficult to relate to, and that eventually turned me off from the Hunt. I guess there are different kinds of puzzle people (crossword vs. cryptic crossword folks, perhaps ?), different predilections. Trees vs. Forest. And I think this distinction is one that people perceive rather sharply when it comes to the issue of “informing people against their will.” If you’re providing the broad connections, the high-level analysis, or connecting the subject to the audience, people may be drawn in enough to stick around for the details. Sure, we have our own concerns, but good journalism helps pull us up out of our own maze of trees, and I think people relate to that.
Really, I think the problem is not high on the horses, but mostly at the other end — where, as you mentioned in another post, journalists all chase the same lurid story regardless of merit, encouraging us to stick our heads up only to smack us down into the mire. Take the recent Anna Nicole Smith coverage as an example. But even so, is that really “informing us against our will”? Thankfully, not all that much, because unlike the fellow at the lunch table, it’s a lot easier to turn it off if we so choose. The problem is that then, against our will, we are not being informed at all.
On the NPR front, I thought this might tickle your fancy as well:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7584982
Jay, good to hear from you. I agree with you that there are different kind of puzzle people. I’m probably a pattern person myself, and as a journalist, I know little bits about a lot of things but not a huge amount of any one thing. It’s a specific kind of knowledge. I used to be facinated by researchers at IBM who talked about different kinds of problems, shallow and deep problems and the different ways to attack them.
With respect to journalism, I think there are differences in US media and London media. You’re right. I think there is a huge herd like mentality with journalism, and I’ve written about it on the blog that Suw and I writer together. The herd misses opportunities. So much time and resource is spent chasing these stories. You’re right in that journalists should help pull people out of their own maze of trees. But I also worry that some journalists get a little arrogant in their role as gatekeepers, to completely mix metaphors. We get caught up in the world view of our sources and forget about the world view of our audience. At any rate, I’m straying into thinking out loud on my personal blog what I write about on my professional blog.
Good to hear from you again Jay. Hope things are well in your part of the world.