AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 485, Feb. 7, 2010
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OUR DIGITAL ERA ASSAULTS US
WITH TOO MANY CHOICES
Even a multimedia junkie like me is
overwhelmed by today's over-abundance
I'm a media junkie. Not just the news media but almost all media: movies, music, television, comics and fine art, and more. Thanks to modern digital technology, this media is easy to come by. I consume most of it without leaving home.
Having all this media so close by is exciting and informative. And often a joy. But it's also overwhelming and exhausting. Indeed, being exhausted from media overload is a sign you're living in the 21st century, like it or not. (Thank goodness, I don't Facebook or Twitter or I'd be even more overwhelmed.)
Which leads to the question: Is all this media -- the news and opinion, movies and music, centuries of art and decades of comics, this overpowering, historic era of human expression, communication and energy, now at our fingertips -- is it a good thing?
I don't want to sound like a multimedia Luddite, but this question is worth considering given we're well into this new digital century.
Take my favorite non-print medium -- movies. When your grandparents were young, the only way to see a film was in a movie theater. Today, they and we can see movies on television (mainly on cable); on DVDs; and through downloads to your computer, smart phones and other digital devices.
The film rental service Netflix has more than 100,000 titles in its ever-growing library to mail to its 12 million subscribers. Others, such as Blockbuster, Amazon and Vudu, have upwards of 20,000 titles to zap directly to your home computer or TV set.
Actually, zap may not be the best word.
Getting movies from a Web-based supplier to your TV requires a good local Internet connection and transmission speed, followed by a major commitment (read expensive) of hardware (TV monitor, multi-channel sound system) in your home.
Next, do you want the movies, TV shows and on-line videos to go to your computer and then your TV? Or, directly to your TV, which requires yet another box to be put next your cable box, old VHS player and newer DVD or Blu-ray disc player. Note: Blu-ray and some video game players can be plugged directly into the Web at one end and your TV or your home theater system at the other end.
Complicated, but in the end rewarding.
However, watching movies in the comfort of your own home theater, with all the extraordinary choices that suggests, may seem a little second rate compared to seeing movies on the road. Every few weeks, manufacturers come out with new gizmos for watching movies everywhere but home. They're call notebook and netbook PCs; or smartbooks, like Apple's new iPad, which squeezes a wireless computer into an object roughly the size of Time magazine; and smartphones and cell phones.
The technologists have yet shrink computers to the size of a wristwatch, a la Dick Tracy, but I'm sure that's coming.
These examples illustrate how today's media assault depends on digital technology. Most of the movies on cable or from services like Netflix are mediocre, at best. Scroll through your cable movie guides -- the majority of pictures receive just two-star ratings.
This glut of movies and videos isn't all boring dreck. YouTube, where people post their homemade videos, has at least a few thousand worth seeing among its hundreds of thousands.
One of my favorites is "Feed Me Bubbe," where an 83-year-old grandmother demonstrates how to cook kosher recipes. The show, produced by her grandson, is simple, informative, charming and delicious. In the three years bubbe (Yiddish word for grandmother) has been on YouTube, she's become a modest worldwide phenomenon, with a Website that includes a store and a question and answer and column. "I didn't even know what an e-mail was," bubbe told the Boston Globe.
There are scores of new media we didn't have a decade ago, such as Websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We can follow celebrities (Paris Hilton) and politicians (Sarah Palin) on Facebook or Twitter. A generation ago, someone like Palin might have might have disappeared into obscurity after an aborted term as a governor. But Palin keeps herself in the public eye between speeches by posting her thoughts on her Facebook page.
However, this new media can turn negative, if not treacherous.
In a middle-class suburb of Boston, a high schooler set up a Facebook event invitation entitled "kill all gay people yea." Some 17 people, including nine from the local high school, signed up to "attend." The town was outraged; the boy was disciplined; no such event took place.
But as the local paper reported, "Facebook has disabled posts in the past that violated taste standards, including some posts that claimed the Holocaust never happened, as well as a poll about killing President Obama."
Our new media world has become an infinite newsstand of everything from brilliant movies to dangerous ideas and opinions. When newsstands were real, not metaphors, the commercial marketplace sorted out the good from the bad. Now anybody with a video camera or just typing away in their underwear can become some kind of star. There are fewer gatekeepers helping us select the good from the junk. For all the benefits of this multimedia age, we're also awash in rubbish.
For recent columns, go to www.johngreenwald.blogspot.com. Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved
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Sidebar head:
In last week's column about the urge to censor, I wrote that China was of two minds about "Avatar" (2009). It pulled the 2-D version of film in favor of the state-sponsored biopic "Confucius," who's quite the rage there now. It also renamed one of its peaks "the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain" because a Hollywood photographer shot the mountain for reference for the movie.
Not so, not so.
Despite starring the internationally famous Hong Kong star Chow Yun-fat playing Confucius, the biopic was a bomb compared to "Avatar," the New York Times reported. Theater owners across the country have pulled "Confucius" after a week, returning "Avatar" to their screens. Apparently, box office won out over politics.
Meanwhile, in Zhangjiajie [cq] in southern Hunan province, officials were to have formally changed the name of "Southern Sky Column" to "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain." But authorities now deny doing so, according to Reuters. This mountain-top contretemps pitted traditionalists against city folks wanting to turn Zhangjiajie into a capitalist tourist trap. Sound familiar? -- John Greenwald
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