ADD

Things are really jumping in the Baldwin/ADD wars. Having been known to publically tease O'C about the site, and to have made a few less than unserious comments, I guess I ought to feel obligated to discuss at great length the point/counterpoint of Baldwin's and Jih's articles. But I don't. Not really. Besides, everyone in the universe has already written about 10,000 pages already, leading me to wonder who has time for all this stuff? Doesn't anyone watch TV anymore?

The big complaint I have about ADD is not that they're commercializing good stuff, but that on their site their commerce and the good stuff are all tossed in willy nilly. I have nothing against educational commerce; I mean, we don't attack textbook publishers for attempting to make money. My ADD problem is that the blog format means that you might have an interesting discussion going on, or interesting news for the community, but the next thing you know, there's some dumb pictures of Day 444 of the VBI hostage situation. If at least they would compartmentalize a little bit, keeping the neutral stuff neutral and the commercial stuff commercial, it would help the casual viewer. And I am, at best, a casual viewer. I like to see if there's any tournament news I should know about, and I'll read an article about a subect I'm interested in (e.g., how to crystallize, or me), but that's usually as far as I go. I just don't care about the rest of it. (I spend probably the same amount of time on the Burgers site, if you want to know the truth. It's just me; it's just the way I am.)

But there is one aspect of the site that does bother me, and that's the glorification of certain debaters. And it's not just through interviews, but in the general celebration of success that occurs by default. A handful of students every year are, indeed, better than everybody else at LD debate (a skill in life that will really come in handy thirty years from now, when their boss turns to them and says, What we really need now is an LDer!). As a result, they dominate outrounds. And they dominate the outrounds at the national circuit tournaments that ADD is always reporting on. So you can't escape these people, and photographs of these people, and shoutouts for these people, no matter how hard you try. If there was no TOC, I wouldn't invent one? If there was no national circuit, I wouldn't invent one of those either! It's not ADD's fault that there's a national circuit, and it's not ADD's fault that people are interested in its doings. And my issue with the glorification of certain debaters has nothing to do with those debaters or their isolated little universe, but that the glorification distorts the importance of TOC and national circuit debate to a degree detrimental to many others in the activity. When students say that a tournament isn't worthy of their time because it doesn't have the right TOC biddage, that tournament suffers and that student suffers and whole teams suffer. And if ADD presents photos of stars on an equal footing with good discussion of debate paradigms, the message is that they are all of equal weight, and that contributes to the suffering. So the problem is not ADD's fault, but they are if not contributing to the problem, they aren't doing anything to fix it.

Yet there is an easy fix for this that goes back to my original point. I don't really care what ADD does, and certainly nothing I say will have any effect on them, but if they were to organize themselves differently visually, into three columns, say, and one column was tournament news, and one column was general debate news, and one column was VB commerce, they could have their cake and even I might be more interested in having the odd slice. No longer would all these things be on an equal footing; the Baudrillardian commodification would be separate, the indirect glorification would be isolated, the good stuff of value to the entire community would stand out better. And, by golly, this would also make the site just more accessible. All news is not created equal; that's why the NY Times site isn't organized last-in last-out. It's organized by importance.

At this point in its existence, ADD rules the roost. It owns LD on the internet. End of story. Sorry, Jason. How ADD uses that ownership is up to ADD. I think that the people who run it who I know are fine people with great intentions. I'm disinclined to assume the ones I don't know are a bunch of evil SOBs. So the bottom line is clear: With great power comes great responsibility. ADD now has great power. It is therefore forced to evaluate closely how it uses that power. Given that the people involved are pretty decent, maybe Jason's article will at least make them reconsider their positioning of some of their content.

(Oh, yeah. About the actual products VB sells? No comment. Never touch the stuff. Probably never will. Then again, if Burgers starts selling stuff—like what? Hamburgers?—I probably won't buy that either.)