Cory Doctorow: On the demise of books, newspapers, music and movies

One change I would like to see is the demise of spreading a 1,500 word article over 5 "pages".

Cory Doctorow irritates me. Possibly it's because his name is thrown out as a big name when the only real thing he's done is launch a popular blog - and not a particularly good blog at that, considering most of his work involves just aggregating submissions. Possibly it's because he's a terrible, imprecise writer who finagled his way into a Nebula nomination on fame alone, who goes about making proclamations about the state of literature without ever seeming to have the faintest idea of what literature is about.

His opinion on newspapers is correct, though blatant and obvious. Unstated, however, is the need for publications that aren't reliant on advertising, papers like the Atlantic and the New Yorker. These papers won't be going away. The New Yorker is more popular now than ever before, and it's likely to continue that way. If anything, we'll see new methods of aggregation that allow for much more copious doses of quality publishing, which will increase the magazine industry's potential. (That's a goal of the site I'm working on now, so it's a subject near to my heart.)

The discussion of movies is a mixed bag. The thing that will cease the production of big-budget movies is the decreasing cost of special effects and powerful cameras, combined with the new-media concept of celebrity that lets most anybody become a star. Talentless celebrities will fade away. The really powerful actors, however, will still command top bill. So perhaps a big movie goes down to a hundred million dollars or fifty million, because things are cheaper and the top price for actors lowers slightly. That won't remove the need we have for big cinema.

Doctorow ignores and always has ignored the inability of piracy and open media to impact physical media. Look at Broadway, which has suffered very little from new media. Look at opera. Movie theaters are a rank below in terms of being special locales, but if anything we'll see a shift towards larger and grander - but fewer - theaters. Larger-than-ever movies will be displayed there; the movies that aren't positively enormous will find other distribution methods.

This quote in particular irked me:

Which isn't to say that no one will make these things henceforth -- give it a decade or two and there may well be rich weirdos who fund these productions the same way there are lovely old codgers who can be coaxed into putting up the dough to mount 15-hour, all-singing, all-dancing Wagner operas. Not a mass medium, nowhere near as culturally relevant as BBMs are today, but still a going concern as a vanity/prestige form.

Excuse the language, but going to attend Wagner isn't a fucking vanity. Wagner wrote incredibly powerful, demanding music, that requires performers who are all virtuoso in every way. Doctorow very obviously has never attended opera before, because opera is one of the sheer most powerful things you will ever see in your life. The people who attend it don't do it for vanity, they do it because opera offers an experience beyond anything else you will see in your life. Similarly, the power of, say, an IMAX screen, offers a moviegoing experience you will never see anywhere else, and so the power of cinema isn't going to up and vanish.

With music Doctorow makes some good points. I doubt talentless bands will disappear, because people genuinely enjoy listening to Nickelback (for instance), but this is his area of expertise and he's correct in a lot of ways.

Books: Doctorow is wrong about e-book readers. They're going to be huge among the small part of the population that enjoys reading. He's wrong about books shifting entirely to poetry: if anything, that's the best disproof for what he's saying. My friends read poetry. The love of poetry occurs when people learn to love and appreciate language, and Billy Collins has done an incredible job of spreading awareness of poetic appreciation to youth. Poetry and prose is selling incredibly well. (Has nobody noticed that despite these claims of the book as a dying form, sales of books in every genre have gone up?)

Doctorow refers to literature as "culturally relevant", which - excuse the language - is bullshit as well. Guess how many people read Ulysses when it was published, or Moby Dick, or The Great Gatsby? These are all hailed as masterpieces not because the culture picked them up, but because people with taste fell in love with them, and because those are the people who get followed as time goes on.

That's the clincher. Doctorow makes these assumptions that quality and appreciation rely on the masses, and they don't. They never will. Appreciation stems entirely from the power of the piece being made. Most people will never watch Citizen Kane, or even 2001. They won't read King Lear or Dune unless they're forced to. The people who do read them won't do it to look sophisticated. They'll do it because they're in love with cinema, in love with reading, in a way that most people never will be. A rare few of those people will go on to make something just as powerful and moving, and things will pick up and continue. That's what keeps these so-called passed-over mediums afloat: not mass, not relevance, but quality. It's why opera will never die, why playwriting will never die, why there will always be novelists who care more about the quality of their work than they care about how many people will read their work.

A final thought on the state of the novel:

When Moby Dick was published people called it the end of the novel. When Ulysses was published people said the same, and again after the same writer published Finnegans Wake. They said it after every novel Beckett wrote, and they said the short story was dead after Borges became known in America. They said it after Gravity's Rainbow. They said it after House of Leaves, which was published in 2000 and is one of the greatest pieces of literature I've ever had the joy of reading. They say it after every writer, even the lesser ones like Steven King and J. K. Rowling, who offer something to literature nonetheless. The novel is still going strong.

So: can somebody explain to me why Cory Doctorow has the following he does? I've never seen him say anything remotely unique or interesting. He just seems to get noticed because he has such a large blog readership, which makes noticing him make about as much sense as turning to Michael Arrington for writings about cutting-edge technology.