Roger Ebert thinks the newspaper industry is dying because “celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think.” But celebrity culture is only taking advantage of the pressures of instant information:
This is as true in politics and physics as it is on the red carpet or the front page of a newspaper. It’s pointless for Ebert to go to battle over shrinking word limits in newspaper columns when we are twittering our lives away 140 characters at a time. The way we communicate is changing.
We are learning to use our digital media as a form of ESP.
We don’t read, we scan.
We jump around quickly searching for patterns,
flashes of relevance
and the instant gratification of icons and images.
Our arguments and ideas no longer sit in tidy, straight lines,
they explode in clusters and constellations.
Ebert’s article itself is already a mosaic,
with dozens of comments colliding with his original rant.
The dots can no longer be connected.
For Ebert to say that the demise of the film critic is ‘the canary in the mine’ of these transformations is ridiculous. We’ve been feeling the tremors for decades.
As mark points out, Ebert isn’t really mourning the death of the newspaper, or even a decline in thoughtful commentary (of which there is no shortage). He is lamenting the death of the professional critic … which is to say …
A similar cry was heard earlier this year at
The Future of Journalism Conference
where journalists insisted that their ‘devotion’ to the news
would continue to set them apart from amateurs.
But a journalist is just someone who disseminates information
and, when everybody is connected to everyone,
we are all journalists.
we are all critics.
we are all response-able.
