Recently Time Out New York published a special feature on the future of criticism. An assortment of critics, most of them fairly well known (at least locally), opined about the future of criticism in a universe overrun with bloggers. Music critic Alex Ross put it well:
Each [print and online] has its advantages and limitations; together they form a comprehensive picture. I adopt somewhat different styles on my blog and in The New Yorker; I enjoy the distinctions, and I believe it’s a mistake for print publications to try to sound "bloggy" or for blogs to ramble on at magazine length.
He's right, but the matter goes deeper than style. This may sound counterintuitive, but serious criticism is not fundamentally about opinions. Criticism uses some earthly phenomenon - a work of art or scholarship, a trend, a political or social argument - as a starting point for an exploration of a matter (or matters) whose importance goes beyond the qualities of the material at hand. Endeavoring to shed some trace of new and persuasive light on something, the critic provides a lens, a focal point, for the collective public intellect. And because its ostensible subjects - the music and movies, the politics, the pop-psychology - interest large segments of the general public, criticism is the most important such focal point we have.
Always a fragile creature, the public intellect is presently under fresh assault from various fundamentalisms, pseudosciences, and abuses of power. While nothing new, these anti-thinking forces are potently aligned today, with Western culture under threat from a "foreign" and more violent fundamentalism than its own and from the consequent overreactions on the home front.
The internet is a double-edged sword - while it stimulates thought, it also makes it easy to magnetize large groups of samesayers (hence the Ron Paul phenomenon, among many others). But the internet's inherently (if imperfectly) democratic nature might end up saving the world. Bloggers, citizen journalists, and enlightened, directed netroots movements are all contributing to a frothing primeval soup of ideas, from which some better-ordered civilizing force has the potential to emerge.
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Article comments
1 - Marcia L. Neil
FOR YOUR INFORMATION: There is some kind of business maxim that states, "employees must be expected to take some criticism from employers". Problems begin when criticism is directed toward individuals from company rosters although individuals have no plans to join such company. There should be some way to complain about such activities, especially since Internet use can increase the persecutory load that targeted individuals must endure.
2 - Kevin Eagan
John, your insight into modern criticism is spot on. I enjoy reading various critical views of pop culture online, but there's something about sitting down with a print copy of a magazine or book that still works. The internet, however, has the potential to open up new, fresh ideas of modern culture and introduce people to the more obscure aspects of culture in a non-threatening way. Thanks for the article (it seems the commenter above doesn't quite understand what you mean by "criticism," but I digress).
3 - Jon Sobel
Thanks Kevin. Yes - somehow I don't think the first commenter actually read the article.
4 - Nancy Allegar
Pretty superficial stuff that might carry more weight if it was written by an actual critic (or even an actual blogger of note).