I am a college student, or, in strictly philosophical terms, an intellectual coiffeur. As such, the Socratic method has become one of the more meaningful, affirming weapons in my academic arsenal.

The method, as any good intellect knows, deals with the art of questioning, the process of eschewing brutally repetitive and entirely useless memorization and instead focusing on the core tenants of our basic, most fundamental beliefs. Socrates believed, even on his deathbed, that the simple act of challenging our views with nothing more than penetrating, straightforward questions would give us a taste of the unattainable possession known as “knowledge.”

Considering the potent versatility of the Socratic method, I spare no subject matter of my academic life from its metaphysical, empirical razor, and the main brunt of my analyses have namely been my approaching college degree—a bachelors in magazine journalism—and the very behemoth I aspire to enter: the media. A recent assignment in one of my journalism classes allowed me such an opportunity.

I was asked to assess two recent Internet creations from Condé Nast Publications, the media Mecca responsible for such luminaries as Vogue, Glamour, Wired, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. The Web sites were Stylefinder.com, a fashion Web site that complements the styles and designs found in Vogue, Glamour, GQ, and other Condé Nast fashion magazines, and trulymadlydating, an online dating service in the guise of eHarmony.

The two sites are, to put it bluntly, crap.

Whenever I am asked to react to the newest form of sugar-coated bile of a rapidly depreciating media conglomerate, I always admit the following: I am a snob when it comes to art, entertainment, and culture. Often, friends and acquaintances tell me that an interest in such garbage is fine, if not justified. After all, they tell me, we all have guilty pleasures that practically demand our attention, and these pleasures, they conclude, are actually good for us, if not therapeutic.

Suffice to say, I rejected this concept early on in my aesthetic development (right around junior year in high school), and since then I have been increasingly conscientious of how I am spending my time. Rather than watch “The Bachelor,” I’ll read Michael Lewis’ latest piece in Vanity Fair. Rather than browse US Weekly for the latest skinny on Jon & Kate Plus Headache, I’ll read the blogs of Glenn Greenwald and Robert Reich. Rather than check out style tips from Stylefinder.com, I’ll commit the ultimate sin of my generation and read a book. Maybe even on economics.

So with a healthy, appropriate dose of conscience, I routinely reject the repeated attempts of old media (aka Condé Nast) to act “hip” and “cool” with our aptly-titled YouTube generation, and with Stylefinder.com and trulymadlydating it became crystal clear to me that such attempts, in their own sweet way, amount to nothing more than the last act of a desperate, prehistoric conglomerate, a final grasp at relevance masquerading as innovation that perfectly demonstrates why American media is undergoing such a radical change. In a move of such misguided pretentions that a special Pulitzer Prize should be created to honor its unbridled commercialism, Condé Nast has become the poster child for why the print media sucks.

On the surface, it pains me to make such a declaration. Condé Nast publishes, on occasion, superlative content. Those Michael Lewis compositions I mentioned earlier? Published by the Condé Nast-owned Vanity Fair. The New Yorker? Arguably the finest magazine currently in print and to which I am a tireless subscriber? Published by Condé Nast.

But even beyond the specific content of these publications, my criticisms of the print media make me feel as though I betray one of my true systematic traits: I love to write, and I admire the written word, from novels to magazine feature pieces to news articles from Bloomberg, to somewhat sickening heights. Few activities require, even at the most rudimentary level, such dedication, such aspiration, such drive; and even fewer are more rewarding.

Buzz Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of such seminal works of journalism as Friday Night Lights and “Shattered Glass,” described it perfectly when he said in a lecture to the University of Massachusetts, “Writing is really hard. It’s really hard. It doesn’t matter what form you practice … It’s isolating. It’s scary. It’s terrifying. It’s lonely. But we do climb up the mountain of whatever project we’re working on and we look down and then, there below us, we see, there it is! There’s that valley we’ve been looking for, and it’s green and it’s tree-lined and it’s beautiful … And we do get there.”

So to better stage any screeds, any criticisms, any dark, seedy, vile frustrations that may be expressed on the state of the American media, I wish to make it clear that I am, at the root, a man who loves and appreciates the craft, the elegance, the undeniable beauty of the written word, and this vantage point produces, in the case of Condé Nast, a painful realization: this is a publisher that should know better, a company that has the road map to Publishing Zion practically sitting in from of them in Times Square. The key, ultimately, is content.

David Simon is among the more potent and fierce critics of the American media. A journalist-turned-TV extraordinaire, Simon began as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun during the 1980s where he covered crime and the Baltimore Police Department. After experiencing some disillusionment at the direction of the newspaper, a period he described as when “[journalism] stopped being fun,” Simon searched for an excuse to take a leave of absence from the paper, finally settling on writing a book about his experiences covering the Baltimore Police Department homicide unit in 1988.

The resulting book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, would become the template for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Streets, a show in which Simon would serve as a writer and producer. Expanding on this experience, Simon would continue to bridge journalism and television, writing a second book with former Baltimore cop and public school teacher Ed Burns entitled The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood that would later be adapted and produced by Simon as an HBO series directed by Charles S. Dutton. Simon’s TV experiences culminated in The Wire, an HBO series that ranks among the more penetrating, intense, and downright intelligent television ever produced.

However, despite his lofty and highly-acclaimed television excursions, Simon never abandoned his journalism roots; indeed, his freelance writings have appeared in such publications as The New Republic and The Washington Post. Though Simon’s current journalism does focus on personal subjects (“A Lonesome Death,” from the Jan 26, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, is particularly worth investigating), the true brunt of Simon’s contemporary journalism focuses squarely on the American media and where it is headed.

In the end, Simon says, the death of our magazines and newspapers is not due to lazy readers, Ritalin-fueled teens, or even blogs, the evil, four-headed beast of journalism. No, the issue, Simon says, has always been content. People flocked to newspapers and magazines in the 20th century because they offered unparalleled content—a potent mixture of news, opinion, and features that exposed corruption, enlightened minds, and contributed to a better democracy.

The journalism of the 1960s and 70s, with names such as Woodward, Bernstein, Talese, Wolf, Sack, Halberstam, Mailer, and Stone, fulfilled the premise Thomas Jefferson described when he wrote, “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Even more, these establishments were well compensated for their efforts, as newspapers continually racked in 15, even 20% profit margins all throughout the 1980s and 90s. During this period, print media, and newspapers especially, were among the more consistently flourishing business models in American capitalism.

Times—and, more importantly, profits—were good. Media companies, in all their irrational exuberance, were more than happy to pocket the extra profits and buy themselves condos, yachts, and more newspapers. This, Simon contends, is where the problem originated. Rather than use the added profits to invest further in their companies (I’m generally thinking of such radical innovations as recruiting the best reporters and photographers money could buy and generously financing their various expenditures), editors, and more importantly, publishers, got LAZY and neglected the very quality of their product as long as the profits remained succulent.

Fast forward to today’s media waste land, and you witness an eternally-depressing scenario: newspaper circulation plummets by the quarter; once-proud publishing companies such as Tribune Company and The New York Times Company practically need blood transfusions to stop their rampant cash hemorrhaging; and all the while, these media publishers and Beltway journalists alike bemoan the current state of journalism in America, reviling blogs and Internet publications with the kind of passion and urgency that used to govern their journalism.

What they fail to realize, ultimately, is that American media is, in actuality, alive and well. In fact, it is flourishing. Online publications such as The Huffington Post, The Daily Kos, Slate, The Young Turks, and The Daily Beast (along with the superlative blogs of Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and the entire umbrella of Democracy Now!) offer not only supreme content of unmatched speed, influence, and dexterity, but they turn hefty profits while at it. The success of these online publications has been well documented (even in The New York Times!); yet, instead of headlines suggesting a new era of content-investment by Condé Nast, we are receiving ads for Stylefinder.com and trulymadlydating. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a little case of prisoner’s dilemma.

The prisoner’s dilemma is a leading area of study in game theory, a sector of applied mathematics (generally involving economics but also used in philosophy, political science, and even biology) that attempts to mathematically capture and study strategic behaviors in games and various scenarios. Though originally developed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher of the RAND Corporation in 1950 to analyze the strategic behavior of Cold War participants, the prisoner’s dilemma is enormously illuminating when pondering other predicaments of choice.

The situation of the prisoner’s dilemma is simple: you and an opponent are faced with two choices, or strategies, one called “defect” and the other “cooperate.” The defect strategy seems, unequivocally, to be your best strategy. Regardless of what your opponent plays, “defect” always provides a better payoff. In game theory, this is called a “dominant strategy,” meaning that the strategy dominates another strategy (called the “dominated strategy”) at all times. You are urged to play your dominant strategies. It is considered the rational move. Anything else would be suicide. Furthermore, by doing this, you follow the famed “invisible hand” philosophy created by legendary economist Adam Smith. A cornerstone of conservative economics, the invisible hand states that by following one’s own self-interest, society on the whole benefits. So our players, by using the defect strategy, should undeniably result in the best situation.

The prisoner’s dilemma, though, takes this concept and turns it on its proverbial head. By using defect, the dominant strategy, and not cooperate, the dominated strategy, you and your opponent do NOT benefit! Though they play their dominant strategies, both players using defect always produces a mutually worse outcome then if both players had used cooperate.

Notice what the prisoner’s dilemma suggests: by studying the strategies before us, and acting in a way we (and Adam Smith) conceive to be rational, we are actually experiencing a worse payoff than if we had acted in a supposedly irrational manner. In an October article in The New Yorker, John Cassidy perfectly explained the dilemma when he wrote, “But in a market environment the individual pursuit of self-interest, however rational, can give way to collective disaster. The invisible hand becomes a fist.”

This is the exact kind of crisis facing media publishers today. They are playing what they see as their defect strategies, dominant forms of behavior that would appear to produce the best payoffs for their respective business models. In this case, these defect strategies involve some form of Web-based subsidiary. Like the defect strategy, this is a seemingly rational move. There has been a myriad of success stories with the Internet while, simultaneously, the headlines are filled with disaster tales about old school media conglomerates.

So Condé Nast, acting in a way that it perceives as rational, creates Stylefinder.com and trulymadlydating and attempts to adapt this new form of technological capitalism to their business model, all the while forgetting about their “cooperate,” or, seemingly irrational strategy: to invest in the content of their publications. In this sense, Condé Nast is not cooperating with their readers; they are defecting, and collective disaster ensues.

In the end, it is exactly as David Simon suggests. Internet publications thrive, just as newspapers did in the 1980s, because of their content. We do not read blogs and other web-based news agencies because we are lazy. We read them because they offer a superior form of journalism. Until the Tribune Companies of the world twist the looking glass 180 degrees and actually examine, with all the forthrightness and brutal honesty of Socrates himself, why their business models fail again and again and again (and again), we will continue to have deranged orifices such as Stylefinder.com and trulymadlydating. What we need is actual, legitimate, vital journalism that a curious public will consume.