The internet, and a crust of truth
So, here you are, looking for that pizza crust recipe…
One cup warm water, with a teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of yeast in it. Give the yeast a moment to get started. Then take two cups of flour (I prefer the “00” pizza flour, because it makes a smoother crust), add a teaspoon of salt, and add the liquid, mixing the whole time. Dump it on the counter, knead it, adding small amounts of more flour until it’s smooth and silky, then drop the dough ball you’ve made back into the bowl, rub olive oil on the ball, cover it, and let it rest for a bit. Then, spread it on the pan and put on the toppings.
There it is. Done. Faster to read than the time it takes you to wipe up the flour on your counter afterwards.
And that recipe is an explanation, in its own way, just why sometimes, the internet drives me batty.
Perhaps it’s because I think of the internet as a tool — I use it that way every single working day, and it is tremendously effective, when it’s not being wildly frustrating. It isn’t, for me at least, something I go to merely for entertainment value.
So, for pizza crust, I want a recipe that works, and one that I can quickly scan to see if I actually have the ingredients I would need to make it.
I don’t need your recipe website to “develop a handy shopping list” for me, nor do I need to hear about how you found your crust recipe in “a little hole-in-the-wall place I went to after an introspective walk along the Via Vecchia Poggioreale in Naples.” It is frankly amazing just how much discussion there is about specific ingredients a reader can’t find anyway (“I like to use a rare artisanal olive oil made by Spanish monks in limited-edition batches…”), or discussion of small towns in Tuscany much removed from my St. John’s kitchen.
I understand that the owners of online recipe sites need me to scroll through as many pages as possible, trundling by scores of ads, so that they can get paid as much as possible before actually handing over the goods. But there comes a point when it’s a waste: the site owners and the advertisers alike must realize that there’s such a welter of advertising that I’m not even paying attention anymore.
I understand the need for sponsors the same way I understand why the National Post would launch a new website that puts a banner advertisement across the screen after every five lines of news story: I just don’t know why they think it’s a benefit to me as a reader (or, for that matter, a benefit to the advertiser) to show me after every six or seven sentences of a news story — especially if it’s the same government ad about “flattening the COVID-19 curve” six times in a row.
Somehow, form has to meet function.
It’s the same for online videos: people clearly love to make them, but I can’t watch them, unless it’s a practical, useful step-by-step on how to replace something like a powered, heated side mirror on a Ford Focus, where I happen to have both the Focus and requisite broken mirror required.
If I want to look at a house online, I want pictures of the house I can move through at my own pace, not a narrated movie starring the listing agent on a stroll through the property. If I’m doing research for work, I want to read from as many sources as I can, not just sit back and gape at a fully-produced audiovisual event for 10 minutes or so. I just don’t have the time in my day.
I’ll admit maybe I’m just not the audience they’re looking for — maybe I’m just doing this all wrong.
Or maybe there’s a deeper truth in what I’m outlining: pizza crust, after all, is basically a form of bread, and the internet looks a lot like a modern-day Roman circus — plenty of empty entertainment to fill the hole.
“Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses,” the Roman poet Juvenal famously wrote, as the democratic Roman republic began its collapse into autocratic government.
Try the crust. Russell Wangersky’s column appears in Saltwire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada.