
Cory Doctorow: On the demise of books, newspapers, music and movies - rms
http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=171555&
======
unalone
Cory Doctorow irritates me. Possibly it's because his name is thrown out as a
big name when the only real thing he's done is launch a popular blog - and not
a particularly good blog at that, considering most of his work involves just
aggregating submissions. Possibly it's because he's a terrible, imprecise
writer who finagled his way into a Nebula nomination on fame alone, who goes
about making proclamations about the state of literature without ever seeming
to have the faintest idea of what literature is about.

His opinion on newspapers is correct, though blatant and obvious. Unstated,
however, is the need for publications that _aren't_ reliant on advertising,
papers like the Atlantic and the New Yorker. These papers won't be going away.
The New Yorker is more popular now than ever before, and it's likely to
continue that way. If anything, we'll see new methods of aggregation that
allow for much more copious doses of quality publishing, which will increase
the magazine industry's potential. (That's a goal of the site I'm working on
now, so it's a subject near to my heart.)

The discussion of movies is a mixed bag. The thing that will cease the
production of big-budget movies is the decreasing cost of special effects and
powerful cameras, combined with the new-media concept of celebrity that lets
most anybody become a star. Talentless celebrities will fade away. The really
powerful actors, however, will still command top bill. So perhaps a big movie
goes down to a hundred million dollars or fifty million, because things are
cheaper and the top price for actors lowers slightly. That won't remove the
need we have for big cinema.

Doctorow ignores and always _has_ ignored the inability of piracy and open
media to impact _physical_ media. Look at Broadway, which has suffered very
little from new media. Look at opera. Movie theaters are a rank below in terms
of being special locales, but if anything we'll see a shift towards larger and
grander - but fewer - theaters. Larger-than-ever movies will be displayed
there; the movies that aren't positively enormous will find other distribution
methods.

This quote in particular irked me:

 _Which isn't to say that no one will make these things henceforth -- give it
a decade or two and there may well be rich weirdos who fund these productions
the same way there are lovely old codgers who can be coaxed into putting up
the dough to mount 15-hour, all-singing, all-dancing Wagner operas. Not a mass
medium, nowhere near as culturally relevant as BBMs are today, but still a
going concern as a vanity/prestige form._

Excuse the language, but going to attend Wagner isn't a fucking _vanity._
Wagner wrote incredibly powerful, demanding music, that requires performers
who are all virtuoso in every way. Doctorow very obviously has never attended
opera before, because opera is one of the sheer most powerful things you will
ever see in your life. The people who attend it don't do it for vanity, they
do it because opera offers an experience beyond anything else you will see in
your life. Similarly, the power of, say, an IMAX screen, offers a moviegoing
experience you will never see anywhere else, and so the power of cinema isn't
going to up and vanish.

With music Doctorow makes some good points. I doubt talentless bands will
disappear, because people genuinely enjoy listening to Nickelback (for
instance), but this is his area of expertise and he's correct in a lot of
ways.

Books: Doctorow is wrong about e-book readers. They're going to be huge among
the small part of the population that enjoys reading. He's wrong about books
shifting entirely to poetry: if anything, that's the best _disproof_ for what
he's saying. My friends read poetry. The love of poetry occurs when people
learn to love and appreciate language, and Billy Collins has done an
incredible job of spreading awareness of poetic appreciation to youth. Poetry
_and_ prose is selling incredibly well. (Has nobody noticed that despite these
claims of the book as a dying form, sales of books in every genre have gone
_up_?)

Doctorow refers to literature as "culturally relevant", which - excuse the
language - is bullshit as well. Guess how many people read _Ulysses_ when it
was published, or _Moby Dick_ , or _The Great Gatsby_? These are all hailed as
masterpieces not because the _culture_ picked them up, but because people with
_taste_ fell in love with them, and because those are the people who get
followed as time goes on.

That's the clincher. Doctorow makes these assumptions that quality and
appreciation rely on the masses, and they don't. They never will. Appreciation
stems _entirely_ from the power of the piece being made. Most people will
never watch _Citizen Kane_ , or even _2001_. They won't read _King Lear_ or
_Dune_ unless they're forced to. The people who _do_ read them won't do it to
look sophisticated. They'll do it because they're in love with cinema, in love
with reading, in a way that most people never will be. A rare few of those
people will go on to make something just as powerful and moving, and things
will pick up and continue. That's what keeps these so-called passed-over
mediums afloat: not mass, not relevance, but quality. It's why opera will
never die, why playwriting will never die, why there will always be novelists
who care more about the quality of their work than they care about how many
people will read their work.

A final thought on the state of the novel:

When _Moby Dick_ was published people called it the end of the novel. When
_Ulysses_ was published people said the same, and again after the _same
writer_ published _Finnegans Wake._ They said it after every novel _Beckett_
wrote, and they said the short story was dead after Borges became known in
America. They said it after _Gravity's Rainbow._ They said it after _House of
Leaves_ , which was published in 2000 and is one of the greatest pieces of
literature I've ever had the joy of reading. They say it after every writer,
even the lesser ones like Steven King and J. K. Rowling, who offer something
to literature nonetheless. The novel is still going strong.

So: can somebody explain to me why Cory Doctorow has the following he does?
I've never seen him say anything remotely unique or interesting. He just seems
to get noticed because he has such a large blog readership, which makes
noticing him make about as much sense as turning to Michael Arrington for
writings about cutting-edge technology.

~~~
froo
_That won't remove the need we have for big cinema._

Exactly and to put that into perspective and using recent results, January 09
has been Hollywood's biggest January on record in terms of ticket sales.

[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-
boxoffice2-2009feb02,0...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-
boxoffice2-2009feb02,0,7465333.story)

------
aristus
One change I would like to see is the demise of spreading a 1,500 word article
over 5 "pages".

~~~
alabut
I wonder if it was to allow section-specific commenting? It's not like
boingboing needs the extra pageviews, they're all rolling in it already.

~~~
unalone
This wasn't published on _Boing Boing_. It's published on a small site that
publishes deep articles such as "Are You a Conficker Zombie?".

