Lee Gomes writes:
... Watching a good movie is "passive" in the same way that looking at a great painting is "passive" -- which is, not very; you're quite actively lost in thought. For my friend, though, the only activity that seemed "active," and thus worthwhile, was when a person sitting at a PC engaged in digital busy work of some kind. ¶ The short cinematic pastiche we saw is an example of what has come to be called a "mash-up," and for a big part of the tech world, these sorts of mash-ups are becoming the highest form of cultural production. ...
Link: Wall Street Journal.
Updated 6/10/2006:
To which Jeff Jarvis responds:
In the Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes — who’s supposed to be writing about the wonders of the web and whose columns I usually like — writes your basic bar-the-door-against-the -future screed arguing that getting “users” to create “content” isn’t always a good thing because some of what they create is bad. There must be some Latin name for this flawed logic - reductio ad snottism: Because someone uses the tool badly, the tool is bad; because some content of a type is worthless, the type is worthless. Well, surprise, but lots of newspaper reporting is bad, though certainly not all. Lots of books are bad, though not all. Ditto movies, TV, music. Quark yielded lots of really ugly zines and pamphlets, though it also produces Conde Nast’s magazines. And so on, and so on. This argument is wearing. ...
Link: BuzzMachine.
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