{"id":619,"date":"2006-12-10T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-10T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=619"},"modified":"2006-12-10T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-10T18:00:00","slug":"the_shitstream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=619","title":{"rendered":"Lost in the shitstream"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon Pareles, the New York Times rock critic, has a wide-ranging, nicely balanced piece<\/a> surveying the various crosscurrents roiling today’s media markets. Most interesting, to me, are the questions he raises about the ultimate cultural consequences of removing the economic barriers to producing, distributing, and packaging creative work. We’re certainly seeing an explosion in self-expression, and that’s all well and good, but in the end a culture has to be judged not on the quantity of its artifacts but on their quality. Will the new media marketplace make it easier or harder for the good stuff to find an audience? Will it strengthen or weaken the incentives for producing quality work?<\/p>\n

When it comes to producing and, equally important, filtering and packaging creative work, the masses seem every bit as crass and conservative as the corporate overlords they’re said to be replacing. Maybe more so, in fact. As Pareles writes:<\/p>\n

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The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from unsigned bands on MySpace \u2014 some played two million or three million times \u2014 tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s often assumed that once you loosen big companies’ chokehold over popular media, you’ll make it easier for good work to find an audience. But, as Pareles notes, it’s not so simple. The good stuff may get more lost than ever in the widening shitstream:<\/p>\n

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The promise of all the self-expression online is that genius will reach the public with fewer obstacles, bypassing the entrenched media. The reality is that genius has a bigger junk pile to climb out of than ever, one that requires just as much hustle and ingenuity as the old distribution system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s the supply side. An even bigger open question lies on culture’s demand side: As the flood of free, immediately and universally accessible user-generated and -filtered content grows, will the audience for well-crafted work shrink? Will we all readjust our tastes and expectations to the easy pleasures of the shitstream? I don’t mean to sound an overly baleful note here. It would be a mistake (thank goodness) to think the motivations of the artist and the craftsman can be reduced to a set of signals from the marketplace. But it would also be a mistake to think those motivations exist outside the influence of those signals. Even in the sphere of culture, demand drives supply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jon Pareles, the New York Times rock critic, has a wide-ranging, nicely balanced piece surveying the various crosscurrents roiling today’s media markets. Most interesting, to me, are the questions he raises about the ultimate cultural consequences of removing the economic barriers to producing, distributing, and packaging creative work. We’re certainly seeing an explosion in self-expression, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}