Having been a blogger for five years, I have a special interest in, and affection for, online media. I commonly come across articles in which the author laments the sorry state of the print media and rants about the deleterious effects of online media. Almost without exception, the authors of such pieces work in print media and are unwilling, or unable, to adapt to the online publication world. I was therefore delighted to encounter an article by my favorite movie critic, Roger Ebert, in which he states that film criticism is flourishing in the online world (see: Film Criticism Is Dying? Not Online; subscription required). Below is an excerpt from this article:
Film critics have suffered plenty of downs lately....That's led to many recent declarations of the Death of Film Criticism. But this is a myth; we're actually living in a Golden Age of Film Criticism. More filmgoers are reading more good writing about more films, new and old, than ever before. They are also reading more bad writing, but there you go. Having lost the ability to speak, I've adopted the Internet as my own social network and am amazed almost daily by yet another extraordinary film critic. These new critics are New Media to their bones. They exploit every available technical resource. Their essays employ streaming audio and video, dazzling links to citations and resources, and endless threads of comments. They say "frame grab" the way we used to say "publicity photo." When all was new and Voyager/Criterion was rolling out "hyperbooks" (CD-ROMs you could click around on), what would we have made of a critic like Matt Zoller Seitz, who today creates elaborate video essays demonstrating an awesome command of movie imagery on websites like Salon?....The Web and HTML have been a godsend for film criticism....In the last year or two, the world's cinema has become even more available. It streams glitch-free in HD quality into big-screen TV sets. This instant, sitting right here, I can choose to watch virtually any film you can think of via Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, MUBI, the Asia/Pacific Film Archive, Google Video or Vimeo. At Europa Film Treasures, I can watch films none of us has heard of. In Seoul, Cairo, Mumbai and Manila, film critics are watching films we could only dream of seeing a few decades ago. And writing about them very well, too.
As a brief aside, I want to present the following brief biographical note about Roger Ebert, explaining his comment that he has lost the ability to speak (see: Biography for Roger Ebert):
As a result of suffering from thyroid cancer [and malignant salivary gland tumor], he had to have his lower jaw removed. He lost all ability to speak, eat and drink. His legs are also weakened from unsuccessful attempts at building a new jaw from other bone and tissue....Despite all health problems, he continued to work as a movie critic.
Ebert reinforces my personal opinion that the availability of on-line media has unleashed a torrent of opportunity and creativity that is reflected, as one example, in film criticism. What I find most interesting about his commentary is that the on-line authors not only publish their idea on the web but also take advantage of on-line streaming video to provide access to many of the obscure films that they review. In short, the web technology works for them in at two complementary ways. This same kind of duality also operates in my world with access to fast-breaking medical and scientific news and the ability to present blog notes to a broad readership.
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