Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuna
It's unfortunate that I feel in some industries we are now seeing a reduced range or quality of products being available due to these price pressures.
Call it the YouTube phenomenon - people advocate 'free' content and point to the fact that anyone can now make a film in their own homes and distribute it for free. The same applies to music and books. However, the vast amount of rubbish on youtube points to the fact that without more investment (time, quality control, production experience, editing and so on), the product you get is not very good and some products are just not made. High quality documentaries are replaced by 'citizen journalism' and so on.
People say "but this is just how it is, this is what new technology does". Anderson tries to make this palatable by suggesting that quality creative works will still find investment through indirect means. However, the reality is that unless we can collectively come up with a better way to support authors, musicians, film makers, we are consigning ourselves to a narrower, lower quality cultural heritage.
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This also irks me, but in reverse. The assumption is that the majority of paid-for content is actually good, wherein in fact its mostly mass-marketed, focus-grouped, carbon-copied pablum. Out of all the BBC produced TV shows this year there was only a tiny fraction of that content that could be labelled as 'good', and as usual we got a vast majority of gameshows, reality based humiliation festivals and soap operas. Content that I pay £100+ every year for through my license fee is barely worth that fee. The movies that have come out in the last ten years suffer a similar fate, sequel upon sequel, frothy inept romantic comedies, CGI demonstrations that forgot to add any kind of plot or character. Same for books if we're all going to be honest about this. What was the last genuinely well-written book that made the best seller list? I'm talking about something that will last more than the plane journey it takes to read? The bookseller lists are crammed full of terrible writing, rehashed ideas and sequel upon sequel. Oh and any argument that says monetary payment is a measure of quality can be rebuked instantly by using only two words: Dan Brown
I think where people get confused is in their analogies, for instance yours equating youtube user generated content with professional TV/movies. Youtube isn't an avenue for serious creative endeavours, and it never was. It's a repostitory of video clips, none more than ten minutes in length (supposedly). This isn't the place where you're going to find much more than drunk people singing, filmed accidents and pop videos, and all of these without any notion of building upon a creative career. if you want creativity go to Vimeo or Revver, even Dailymotion has more interesting user-generated content.
I suppose what I'm arguing is the Zappa equation (99% of everything is shit). That Zappa equation applies equally to traditional and new media, the only shift we're actually seeing is in how the audience filters out the shit from the shine. The responsibility is now firmly in our hands (pardon the image) to figure out what is good and what is bad. No more intermediaries from the big corps making the initial decisions on what sells and what does not. Because if the ability of a work of fiction to make money is the only metric by which we measure 'quality culture', then we're all fucked.