Tag: Internet

And not just a movie; Snyder hasn’t created some processional of images or a living audio book. He’s made a film that feels like a living, breathing thing all its own while also being – almost completely – the book. Snyder’s Watchmen captures the themes and the meanings and the characters that Moore and Gibbons created but makes them his own, turning the movie from being simply an adaptation into something that feels closer to collaboration.

Had he only done that, Snyder would have earned a positive review from me. But he does more; Snyder had crafted a movie that flirts with honest to God greatness, that doesn’t just capture the events of the comic but also the humanity and the emotion. It’s a remarkable film, and an uncompromising one. It’s the sort of movie that major studios are simply not supposed to be making now that the 1970s are over.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog then crunched the numbers against the approval ratings of upcoming presidential candidates and other politicians, and it’s not particularly flattering reading. Barack Obama can take heart from the fact that at least he’s not as unpopular as Jar Jar Binks, but is outdone by Emperor Palpatine, a man determined to let the forces of evil govern entire galaxies. Hillary Clinton will be similarly disappointed to learn than her 19% approval rating puts her on a par with amoral bounty hunter Boba Fett – but then again she doesn’t have a cool jetpack.

Blogging persists, of course. But it’s mostly for adults – professionalised to the point where the old “bloggers vs journalists” debates now seem hopelessly quaint. Maintaining a personal blog has become entrepreneurial: a job that earns an income through display advertising, network marketing, ebooks and blog-to-book deals.

Concomitantly, blogging has indelibly influenced mainstream news reporting, which is now much more immediate, informal, link-rich and inclusive of reader comments. When I taught online journalism at Monash University from 2009-11, students published their assignments on WordPress blogs.

So for young people, blogs are work, not play. A 2008 Pew research project found that while 85% of 12 to 17-year-olds engaged in electronic personal communication (including texting, email, instant messaging and commenting on social media), 60% didn’t consider these texts to be “writing”. Another study in 2013 revealed that teenagers still distinguish between the “proper” writing they do for school (which may be on blogs) and their informal, social communication.

By contrast, my fondness for prose – and my disgusted CLOSE TAB when an interesting link turns out to be, ugh, a video – marks me as a digital fogey. I didn’t get Tumblr for the longest time. Why were people just reblogging other people’s posts?

Sure, part of it was that by that point, I had begun to feel a little like a one-hit wonder. But I also realized that I didn’t recognize the manic pixie anymore. Clearly labels and definitions are inherently reductive. And if you are a critic, labels and names and definitions are a necessary evil. But it’s a particular feature of the fast-paced, ephemeral world of online criticism that writers are always seeking quick reference points to contextualize their analysis — so the rise of the MPDG was in large part a creation of the Internet as well.

Which is not to say I wasn’t nervous, by the way. I was terrified. I had no idea I’d be as nervous as I was. I’ve done storytelling shows before, and those are a bit nervewracking, but this was something else entirely. Storytelling shows have a sort of implicit sanction: If it happened to you, it’s interesting. Last night, I wasn’t just relating a personal experiences—I was sharing sentences I constructed in the hopes of to eliciting a specific physical reaction from the crowd. If that reaction didn’t happen—if no one laughed—it would be because I was doing a bad job. Period.