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February 18, 2008

When Did Brian Lowry Become An Old Crank?

I clicked on Brian Lowry's Variety column, titled "Strike unleashed Internet ire" and sub-headed, "Mob mentality rules on talkbacks, boards," thinking... hmm... maybe he's walking in the same footprints I set out last week, but ok, maybe he has something interesting to add...

Nope!

Instead, we get what Variety has become the master of lately... vitriolic whining about the internet, no specifics, open acknowledgement that “they” really don’t care much for the web or the idea that anyone not anointed by print is allowed to be given positive credit for any idea at all.

Really, how is anyone supposed to take a writer who offers this combination of comments seriously?

First -
“After a brief experiment with being LinkedIn to colleagues and acquaintances, I found the process to be a time-wasting annoyance with no discernible benefits. Yet social-networking adults continue to emulate teenagers, which seems a dubious goal at best.

Later –
“The Web fosters an unrealistic sense of how widely held their views are. As an example, a woman indignantly responded to a recent review I wrote by emailing that ‘the purpose of your job ... is to relate to viewers like me, the general public. Get to know what we tend to like.’”

Of course, I completely agree with Lowry that a critics’ opinion is not about taking the pulse of the public. That is a fool’s errand.

But in one graph, he dismisses social networking utterly because of his lack of interest in it (one I share) and then in the next, dismisses a (surely online) reader of his for overreaching in their opinion. In other words, if you agree with me, you are the mainstream. And if not, you are a damned web loser, full of yourself.

Again, what so disturbs me about this screed is that I agree in principle with a lot of what Lowry has to say. Yes, minority groups were given way too much cred during the WGA strike via the manipulation of the web… just as the extreme right is by Traditional Media during national election campaigns.

Yes, people tend to turn into raving assholes when they are given the power of anonymity on the web… as are many journalists when given the cover of a “major” media outlet.

Yes, much of the dialogue is coarse. But it is often actual dialogue, for better or for worse, and this is more than you can say about life inside the bubble of Traditional Media.

The most shocking thing about the piece is how it manages to piss willfully over an entire developing medium and shows a profound lack of courage by refusing to engage its subject directly. It is, virtually, the embodiment of what is wrong with Traditional Media in this era. Love her or hate her, doing this story without naming Nikki Finke is cowardly. Equally heinous is indulging in all this name calling without really addressing the real issues of how the most extreme factions took control of the storytelling about this strike by using the web effectively. There is a real story there, not just another opportunity to bore us all with weeping about that out of control internet. (It is, however, a blessed miracle that there was no mention of cats falling in toilets on YouTube in the entire piece!)

Anwyay… as I wrote… I agree with Lowry on much of this, in principle. But I haven’t closed the intellectual drawbridge in my ivory castle with Sir Bart-a lot and Goldstein: Earl of Agent Lunching, unable to defend my position with anything more than insults.

You couldn’t write an argument more coarse and less seriously considered than this one.

The internet era ruffians Stone & Parker mocked this kind of thinking a few years back with an Oscar nominated paean to misguided anger against something that might actually be worth arguing about… “Blame Canada.”

Posted by poland at February 18, 2008 12:03 AM

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Posted by: Wrecktum at February 18, 2008 11:53 AM

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