Two reasons why it's easier to find an audience for writing on the basis of different experiences than novel ideas
Maybe it’s my imagination, but if the two basic pitches for a non-fiction bit of media are “I have a different experience” and “I have a novel idea”, it seems to me that after about 2008 the balance started tipping from ideas to experiences and the personal essay rose to prominence. Even when ideas are nominally the focus, the identity of the person having them has become more important. This is most obviously true through articles like “here’s what I think of X as a person of Y identity”. However it is also true in subtle ways. For example, the Conversation, and its op-eds written by academics- must be written by academics, and not even people with equivalent experience. A lot of the remaining idea based stuff is done by opinion columnists in legacy publications. Of course there’s Twitter, but that’s very short form.
This is a source of great interest and dismay for me because I’m definitely more of an ideas guy. Like most people I have all sorts of unique, fascinating and grotesque experiences that could be turned into articles, but I don’t like to write about them unless I can find a philosophical angle on them because, for me, it feels a little narcissistic. However, over the years and to my own dismay, I have been drifting further into personal experiences as a source of writing, probably as a result of Darwinian pressure on my behavior(1).
I think there are two reasons why the internet doesn’t have a lot of lot of time for long form latter day op-eds and argumentative essays.
You can immediately tell when someone is bringing new experiences to the table in their writing, or at least experiences different from your own. Working out whether they’re presenting interesting new ideas takes more time. Thus novel ideas lose out in the fierce competition for attention against novel experiences.
There’s an ego barrier. We all fancy ourselves intelligent people. We can accept that someone might have different experiences to us, but accepting that they might be a source of insights unknown to us is more galling.
You might be thinking “but hasn’t factor two always been true- how does that explain the change”? Answer: Factor two also ties back into factor one. If we had more time to contemplate what someone had to say we might come to accept them as a source of interesting insights, thus overcoming the ego barrier and putting them in the “worth listening to” category- but in this fleeting attention economy we don’t.
(1)- There’s an essay to be written about how the quantitative feedback (comments, likes, etc.) of this period means that our social behavior is under stronger forces of something like natural selection that ever before. We are quantitatively shaped by clear environmental signals, and behavior, as Skinner noted, can be analogized to an evolutionary process with variation and selection.