Johann Hari wonders if professional criticism is coming to an end, pushed out by armchair critics empowered by social media. If so, he suggests, we would lose a great deal.
Critics do two things according to Hari. They provide “consumer advice,” and they help audiences grasp the deeper meaning of sometimes baffling works of art or literature. The first can be done by citizen critics on Twitter, Facebook, and the comment section of Amazon. The second, however, requires learning and space–something established critics are no longer getting. Magazines are cutting coverage, and where criticism is still published, it is now much shorter:
Kael’s famous review of Bonnie and Clyde was 7,000 words long. Most critics today are lucky to get 700; on Twitter, they get fewer than 700 characters. Indeed, their work is most regularly seen now through online review aggregators, where the words are stripped out and all that remains is a banal star rating.
If criticism is cut from all magazines and newspapers, Hari argues, “all that will be left to navigate us all through a roiling ocean of culture will be unpaid amateurs and advertising.”
I think Hari’s alarm is misguided. While the general trend is of diminishing space, he ignores contrary developments, such as The Wall Street Journal’s expanded book coverage, The Chicago Tribune’s new stand-alone weekly, “The Printer’s Row,” and the recently launched online-only Los Angeles Review of Books.
Why are these newspapers and media companies launching review sections or creating entire publications devoted to criticism? At RealClearBooks (another venture that bucks Hari’s trend), Mark Judge reminds us that reading is a contemplative activity and—via Thomas Merton—that contemplation is a natural (if sometimes thwarted) inclination: “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest. That activity, which is contemplation, is immanent and it transcends the level of sense and of discourse.”
Criticism is one means of satisfying this need for contemplation, which is why I think it would take more than Twitter to dispatch of it. In fact, certain technologies, such as Amazon’s Kindle, makes reading long-form criticism easier, as Alan Jacob points out in his excellent The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.
But what do other First Things readers think? Do you still read longer (plus 1,500 words) art, theater, and book reviews? Am I right in thinking these will always be around in some form or other?
July 9th, 2012 | 1:41 pm
Isn’t Johann Hari a plagiarist? His career makes me wonder if professional journalism is coming to an end.
July 9th, 2012 | 4:29 pm
I still subscribe to enough print versions of things to prefer them in hard copy to e-readers or online reading. While you do note a few physical copies of expanded coverage above, the dominant form of criticism is moving to the web and other electronic versions of things.
That said, with the ubiquity of the link on the web, I do think shorter articles and less criticism is somewhat inevitable, simply because most people’s attention spans will have decreased.
To the several publications to which I subscribe to physical copies (First Things included), every summer I get the pleas for more money so that the periodical can continue. The irony of the plea for money is that the implicit message is that print is a dying medium, and with it, probably 1500 word articles. I lament it, and don’t welcome it. And I’m not saying it’s inevitable; just more likely than the alternative.
July 9th, 2012 | 4:39 pm
Not only a plagiarist but also someone who, under a nom de plume, went to weird lengths maliciously to change wikepedia information on upright fellow journalists like Nick Cohen and Christina Odone here in England. A totally unpleasant conniving individual.
July 9th, 2012 | 6:38 pm
David–
Good thoughts. My hope is that the move away from print will not necessarily lead to only short pieces. Cost limitations on word count would be gone, and as Jacobs’s notes in his book, certain technologies like the Kindle encourage longer rather than shorter engagement in works. We’ll see.
July 10th, 2012 | 7:03 am
I think a far more important issue is the decline of editing. Especially in the world of e-publishing, talented editors who take time over a book are becoming scarce. And, for what it’s worth, the comboxes yield not only consumer advice, but sometimes lively discussions –something you just don’t get with print publications, and long reviews.
July 10th, 2012 | 9:05 am
And, by the way, Hari cites a) Pauline Kael, b) a 7,000-word movie review, c) of Bonnie and Clyde –and then complains about the banality of star-ratings? One argument in favor of the word-limits of comboxes and the other restraints of e-publications is the discipline they can impose upon self-important windbags.
July 10th, 2012 | 9:16 am
Good point, Michael.
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