Art and Commerce Combine: Oh Joy!

I’d like to comment on two particular issues brought up in the reading; Media convergence and the merger of art and commerce. Now that all types of media are available to all demographics, the tendency of producers is to dilute entertainment and information as much as they can to avoid offending anyone and therefore increase their circulation. But while this can lead to higher short term profits, their products have no staying power and therefore never pass into the long lasting realm of “art”.
I think this is a major problem facing our society because our culture is becoming disposable. Everyday brings a new viral video, political “Battle”, or television guest star while the ones that came before nose dive into oblivion. And this is no accident. It has a design. Everyone in a position of power wants the masses to have a microscopic attention span so that they can fuck up and no one will notice. And the business moguls like it because they can produce the same low grade swill over and over and still reap obscene profits.
Somehow I think the “revolution” in Reganomics has finally warped this country to the point where we can’t even produce relevant art anymore, at least not on a massive level. Almost every movie that I’ve liked in the last decade has been labeled an “independent” film, and the ones that weren’t slapped with that label were either Oscar grabs or foreign films. And they all comprise only about ten percent of the total market. That means nine out of every ten films made now I will either only watch once or never watch at all. And that disturbs me because I’m trying to make a career in filmmaking and I’m going to the movies less and less.
Media today is designed to be a hit and run experience. Come in, take the money and run; and under no circumstance leave any evidence you were ever there.

And so it begins...

This week I was asked to read “Media Unlimited” by Todd Gitlin and all I can say is I tried. I really tried. But this book is so goddamn dry that I just couldn’t absorb it in any meaningful capacity. I got about thirty pages in before I had to stop and literally say to myself “God this book is dense”. Then I thought, “It must just have a slow start. I’ll go deeper and find the good stuff”. So I opened to the middle and started skimming. But still, nothing.
This book is like a trash bag filled with facts and statistics packed so tightly that is just becomes one big ball of garbage. It reads more like a research paper than a book, so I turned to the last page to figure who this Todd Gitlin guy really is. And then I understood. This guy is a professional lecturer. And on top of that, he’s a professor at Columbia University. So I’m guessing that he really loves the sound of his own voice. He probably spends all day looking this stuff up just so he can regurgitate it in dense streams of information like this. And to top it all off, his cultural reference are all stuck in 2002. He mentions The Sopranos and Eminem as if they’re timeless cultural events.
To Sum up, I have nothing against college professors, but professional windbags like this are the reason students would sometimes rather surf the net than listen in class.