My favorite tv show, other than the Apprentice, is a show called Project Greenlight. Unknown screen writers enter a competition, and a screenplay is selected to be produced into a motion picture. An unknown director is selected to direct. The process is filmed in traditional Real World fashion. The show is interesting, because people love movies and want to see how they get made. And because most people believe that, if given the opportunity, they could write, or direct, or star in a motion picture, just as good or better than the movies that are actually made.

The show could be argued to prove the opposite: that the people who are making movies really do know what they are doing. The process works.

The show could also be argued to reveal the ways in which factors wholly unrelated to creativity – e.g. "star power", personality conflicts, and budget – dictate what the results will be.

In any event, we are faced with a more and more democratic way of delivering art. Books can be self-published. Self-made journalists can simply fire up a blog. Our neighbors appear on Oprah and become the stars of reality tv shows. Every musician has his or her own CD.

The great thing is that everyone gets an opportunity. Everyone has a voice. There is a lot more entertainment and information and education available.

The bad thing is that a lot of it is shit.

Of course, a lot of the Establishment's music, journalism, literature, and art is shit too. But there was less of it. So you had a way of separating out the good from the bad.

Though more complex, the essential questions remain: Where are the standards? Who makes them? Are they doing a good job?

We have all heard the lay person call in to a radio or television show, or write in to a newspaper or magazine, with that one perceptive comment that all of the "experts" had missed.

And yet, for every one of those comments, there are the 50 completely worthless, boring, inane, often counter-productive "dittos" and "ums" and re-hashings of mis-guided and unsupported theories that are just being parroted from one person to the next.

You listen to talk radio these days, and half the show is about how "good" the calls are. Some guy on the Jim Rome Show reading from a homemade cue card delivers the same type of endless, sarcastic, Murphy Brown-style string of oblique references in a statement-joke format that got Dennis Miller fired from Monday Night Football. And then, you can't tell whether – after congratulating the caller – the host is speaking off the cuff, reading prepared text, looking at something one of his writer's slipped to him, or reciting an e-mail from a caller. Not to pick on him, necessarily. He is the "best" person on at that time, or I guess I wouldn't listen to him. But, presumably, the person is on the radio precisely because he or she is more intelligent or entertaining and well-informed than the average caller.

Democratization is good. But it's also limited. There just isn't enough time in the day to listen to, and to read, and to watch, everything that everyone's got to say. So it's more important than ever that those people who have the keys to the airwaves, or the internet, or the studio, use them responsibly, so that the best of what people – any people – have to offer is placed on the pedestal.

“It was a clever business idea to devise a series of guidebooks in which most of the labor – the research and writing – is done free by thousands of readers, who complete questionnaires at your request?

“Nick Negroponte, an Internet pioneer who happens to be an investor in my company, said that we were the precursor of interactivity. On the other hand, he said we didn’t know what we were doing.

“Are there any new categories of guidebooks you are thinking of adding to the Zagat line?

“We might do a guide to books.

“Books as in fiction and literature?

“Yes.

“What use would that be? A numerical rating is not a substitute for bona fide literary criticism.

“If you look at movie critics side by side, or restaurant critics side by side, you find out that it’s a very subjective business. They disagree all the time.

“But that’s the point of criticism – it offers the sharpness of an individual voice as opposed to a bland system of averages. Can’t anyone write in to your restaurant surveys?

“They can write in, but that doesn’t mean they get counted. They have to pass through filters. I don’t want to have people cheating.

“How, exactly, do you filter out cheaters, like restaurant owners who might send you glowing reviews on their own behalf?

“I could tell you, but I would have to kill you.”


- Interview with Tim Zagat, by Deborah Solomon, “Of Fats and Food” New York Times Magazine, Dec. 17, 2006, p.23.

“Earlier generations of American parents were in the thrall of godlike experts like Dr. Spock or Dr. Brazelton. But thanks in part to the Internet, ‘now everybody’s an expert,’ says Ann Hulbert, author of ‘Raising America.’ The democratization of expertise was meant to be ‘a great, liberating thing,’ Ms. Hulbert said. But instead, it’s more stifling, because everybody is a judge of everybody.’”


- Jodi Kantor, “Buzzwords” New York Times, Dec. 24, 2006, p.4.

The constant, unresolved, ongoing, internal struggle between my romantic and egalitarian ideals that genius can be found almost anywhere, in almost anyone, on the one hand, and my desire for (and, to some extent, arrogant and egotistical, or sometimes despairing, belief in) orderly and hierarchical structures with inherently and objectively “better” practitioners and manifestations of art, and politics, and other forms of human endeavor, on the other, has been exemplified in the dialogue, or dialectic, surrounding the 2006 Time Person of the Year.... “You”.

A few weeks before the Time Magazine 2006 Man of the Year issue was released, John Pareles published a column in the Arts & Leisure Section of the New York Times, entitled “2006, Brought to You by You.” Discussing various aspects of the “Web 2.0" culture of MySpace, YouTube, wiki, blog, and other methods of self-expression, Pareles comments that “all that free-flowing self-expression presents a grandly promising anarchy, an assault on established notions of professionalism, a legal morass and a technological remix of the processes of folk culture. And simply unleashing it could be the easy part. Now we have to figure out what to do with it: Ignore it? Sort it? Add more of our own? In utopian terms the abundance of self-expression puts an end to the old, supposedly wrong-headed gate-keeping mechanisms: hit-driven recording companies, hide-bound movie studios, timid broadcasting radio stations, trend seeking media coverage. But toss out those old obstacles to creativity and, lo and behold, people begin to crave a new set of filters.... User generated content - turning the audience into the auteur - isn’t exactly an online innovation. It’s as old as ‘Funniest Home Videos’ or letters to the editor or community sings or Talmudic commentary or graffiti. The difference is that in past eras most self-expression stayed close to home. In the 20th Century recording and broadcasting broke down that isolation. Yet those same technologies came to reinforce a different kind of separation: between professional artist and audience. A successful artist needed not only creativity and skill, but also access to the tools of production – studios, recorders, cameras – and outlets for mass distribution. Low budget recording and the Internet have handed production and distribution back to artists.... 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 – some played two million or three million times – 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. Unlike the old media roadblocks, however, their filtering can be easily ignored. The promise of all the self-expression on-line is that genius will reach the public with fewer obstacles, by-passing 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.”

Time Managing Editor, Richard Stengel, two weeks later, explained the thought process behind naming “You” as the 2006 Time Person of the Year: “that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy. From user-generated images of Bagdad strife and the London underground bombing to the macaca moment that might have altered the midterm elections to the hundreds of thousands of individual outpourings of hope and poetry and self-absorption, this new global nervous system is changing the way we perceive the world.... There are lots of people in my line of work who believe that this phenomenon is dangerous because it undermines the traditional authority of media institutions like Time. Some have called it an ‘amateur hour.’ And it often is. But America was founded by amateurs. The framers were professional lawyers and military men and bankers, but they were amateur politicians, and that’s the way they thought it should be. Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger, and Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th Century, Poor Richard’s Almanack. The new media age of Web 2.0 is threatening only if you believe that an excess of democracy is the road to anarchy.... Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they’d never been. But now another in Bagdad with a videotape can let you see a roadside bombing, or a patron in a nightclub can show you a rant by a famous comedian. These blogs and videos bring events to the rest of us in ways that are often more immediate and authentic than traditional media. These new techniques, I believe, will only enhance what we do as journalists and challenge us to do it in even more innovative ways.”

Brian Williams, the anchor of NBC Nighty News, whom I saw on a talk show recently looking and sounding like a defensive, pretentious, condescending, blow-hard, nevertheless may be correct when he describes us and our culture as the “User-Generated Generation” and the Internet as “a treasure-trove of adults juggling kittens, ill-fated dance moves at wedding receptions, political rants delivered on camera with venom and volume. All of it exists” Williams says, “to fill a perceived need.” And “the larger dynamic at work is the celebration of self. The implied message is that if it has to do with you, or your life, it’s important enough to tell someone.... It is now possible – even common – to go about your day in America and consume only what you wish to see and hear. There are television networks that already agree with your views, iPods that play only music you know you already like, Internet programs ready to filter out all but the news you want to hear. The problem” he continues, “is that there’s a lot of information out there that the citizens of an informed democracy need to know in our complicated world.... Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we’re all talking at once? What if ‘talking’ means typing on a laptop, but the audience is too distracted to pay attention? The whole notion of the media is now more ‘democratic’, but what will the effect be on democracy? The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge ... because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart.”

“For some” Steven Johnson observes, “it has power-to-the-people authenticity. For others, it signals the end of quality and professionalism, as though the history of electronic media turned out to be one long battle between Edward R. Murrow and America’s Funniest Home Videos, and America’s Funniest Home Videos won.... There is undeniably a vast increase in the sheer quantity and accessibility of pure crap, even when measured against the dregs of the newsstand and the cable spectrum. That decreased signal-to-noise ratio means that the filters – search tools, recommendation engines, RSS feeds – become increasingly important.... If you read though the arguments and the Op-Eds over the past few years, you’ll find the debate keeps cycling back to two refrains: the impact of blogging on traditional journalism, and the impact of Wikipedia on traditional scholarship.... This is a perfectly legitimate debate to have, since bloggers and Wikipedians are likely to do some things better than their professional equivalents and some things much worse, and we may as well figure out which is which.... But the fact is that most user-created content on the Web is not challenging the authority of a traditional expert. It’s working in a zone where there are no experts or where the users themselves are the experts.... What’s so interesting about those local conversations is that they involve experiences that the experts in traditional media have largely ignored – for good reason. Those experts realize that they can’t compete with the real experts: the people who live in these communities and know all the issues – small and large – that shape their daily lives.... There’s some irony in that lack of media coverage because the zone of experience that people care most passionately about – beyond the intimate zone of family life – is the zone of their local community. Every successful neighborhood has always had its maven and connectors, the true experts of the sidewalk, the playground, and the backyard barbecue. But that local knowledge has been limited historically to the personal contact of word-of-mouth. Now, on the Web, it has a megaphone.”

In response to the Time Person of the Year issue, columnist Frank Rich observed that: “As of Friday morning, ‘Britney Spears Nude on Beach’ had been viewed 1,041,776 times by YouTube’s visitors. The count for YouTube video clips tagged with “Iraq” was 22,783. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But compulsive blogging and free soft-core porn are not, as Time would have it, indications of how much you, I and that glassy-eyed teenage boy hiding in his bedroom are in control of the Information Age. They are indicators instead of how eager we are to flee from brutal real-world information that makes us depressed and angry. This was the year Americans escaped as often as they could into their private pleasure pods.”



[See John Pareles, “2006, Brought to You by You” New York Times, Dec. 10, 2006, p.30; Richard Stengel, “Now It’s Your Turn” Time, Dec. 25, 2006, p.8; Brian Williams, “Enough About You” Time, Dec. 25, 2006, p.78; Steven Johnson, “It’s All About Us” Time, Dec. 25, 2006, p.80; Frank Rich, “Yes, You are the Person of the Year!” New York Times Dec. 24, 2006, p.8.]