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In
the ebb and flow of any given month in the mass media, there's
as much cause for concern as there is for celebration. Cautious
celebration, that is. Entertaining, nauseating, intellectually
stupefying, and sometimes unexpectedly incisive, the voices of
television, print, the web, and elsewhere are continuing to illuminate
and obfuscate the major news and happenings of our day. The general
repugnance of this situation would be reason enough to tune out
altogether-it would, but in reality no one is willing to remove
the conch shell we've got pressed, maybe hermetically sealed to
our ears by habit of our own idiosyncratic media diets. Like babies
down at the beach, or teens held fast by a radio pop song, we
keep listening to the waves.
This
month brave new world bravura took a pause, as American media grappled
with its Elian infatuation and its media establishment's navel-gazing.
Even then, l'affaire Napster tabled a new level of sophistication
to the ongoing debate over how media, art, and commerce will continue
to co-exist; the wired universe took further hold in print; and
people began to understand why, and how, this just may augur a future
worth waiting on.
The
Elian Gonzalez debacle deserves no re-cap here or elsewhere (the
movie-of-the-week version will probably beat me to the punch anyway).
The Elian
soap opera was evocative, of course, but not a very distinctive
media event in the storied tradition of OJ and Monica. Not, that
is, until Elian was taken into custody by American authorities and
it became a bona fide visual spectacle. Every
picture tells a story , of course, and this case was no different.
Time and Newsweek played their competing identities
as the American newsmagazine of choice to the hilt-each one splashing
a markedly different photo on their respective cover to interpret
the Elian climax. Time gave us an old picture of Elian and
his natural father, a fantasy composite of the father-son reunion
that would now be forthcoming. Newsweek opted for the sensationalistic,
playing the contrarian propagandist by showing a weeping Elian cringing
in terror as an impressively frantic and armoured (oh, and don't
forget gun-toting) government soldier loomed over the boy and his
protector. A ridiculous showing by both magazines, but one that
gets to the quick of their shortcomings as vehicles for editorial
competence or insight.
Elsewhere,
meanwhile, media criticism was turning into self-criticism. Taking
press critic Howard Kurtz to task, Franklin Foer of The New Republic
found himself the target of reactionary fire. Foer justifiably railed
against Kurtz--and the cabal of media critics who follow in his
mold-for his "modern-day
Victorianism". While critiques of Foer's kind are indispensable
for showing up the blasé self-righteousness and petty crusading
of journalists like Kurtz, they don't meet a festive reception in
the closed-shop mentality characteristic of many division of mass
media. As if on cue, a Kurtz apologist redressed Foer's argument
with a weak rebuttal, essentially that
"Schadenfreude is the pre-eminent pastime among journalists".
This wouldn't be the first time someone likened the press to a pack
of vultures, but this rhetoric demonstrates how little ground there
is to be carved out in media discourse for considered critical discussion.
And
the debates over the culture and quality of the online world continue
to simmer. For every traditionalist conservative view of how online
journalism is perverting established practices , there's a counter-argument
not far behind. Case in point, news like the recent findings of
a major study of web surfing, which convincingly argued that the
web is more
about text and reading than it is about images and viewing-at least
for now . Convergence will take its own sweet time, but hyperlinks
are beginning to steadily infiltrate the starched ranks of daily
newsprint.
The
Internet ground-swell shows no signs of abating just yet. Far from
the doyennes of media and the captains of industry above them, ordinary
people are taking possession of the evolving media landscape as
its own. Even TV fanatics, the most routinely criticized audience
segment in modern entertainment, are showing verve and creativity
in the way they adapt their favourite shows and actors to their
own storylines in so-called slash
fiction. The more militant, at the same time,
spread the gospel of more direct means of affecting the media
through activism and old-fashioned, Elian-style propaganda. Kudos
to Feed writer Julian
Dibbell for recognizing what the
throwbacks at Editor & Publisher could not: the web-log
is not just an exploding phenomenon of the individual voice shouting
out on the web-it was the web's first one, too. In a sense, the
"Blogger" is the online world's only genuine citizen. Largely due
to the efforts of information-age mavens like Jim Romanesko [http://www.newyorkmag.com/page.cfm?page_id=3066],
the media world will never be the same.
A
quick jump cut to absurdity this month places one squarely in the
domain of Metallica's legal battles with the infamous MP3 distribution
software developer, Napster. Like some oddly-timed guitar solo,
the once avant-garde of metal rock have proven themselves able apparatchiks
for the Man (in this case, the recording industry). Flying in the
face of logic, and of polls showing 73%
of American university students regularly use Napster -and
would actually pay to continue using it!-bands like Metallica and
Dr. Dre have gone on a litigation spree. Of course, there is
little to no support for an industry many feel is hopelessly
retrograde in its commercial, legal, and artistic practices. Some
bands, like Limp Bizkit and The Offspring, are on the record about
their distaste for these outmoded notions of their own industry.
Imagine the embarrassment of being intellectually clobbered by Fred
Durst , if you dare. At this rate, if the revolution is indeed
televised, look for the surest harbinger: a Metallica greatest hits
compliation. Failing that, solo albums. The collective landscape
or stage of all these dispatches (and worse ones, believe me) has
been called mediocracy, or mediopoloy; yet for every bit player
like Lars Ulrich who comes crawling out of the works to litigate
their own warped tunnel vision, the state of affairs inches somewhat
closer to something we may as well name what it is--mediocrity.
Copyright
© 2000 Jeffrey MacIntyre All Rights Reserved
Jeffrey
MacIntyre is a Vancouver web editor and writer www.nudity.com.
He is a media columnist for *spark-online.
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