Hopefully, They Won't Get the Oscar for Obsolescence

Today's medianote was about an article in yesterday's Opinion Section of the Los Angeles Times by Neal Gabler entitled entitled The Movie Magic Is Gone. Gabler lays out a pretty compelling case that the movie industry is going to have an increasingly difficult time being at the center of American popular culture. Of course, that can be said for just about all of the traditional (i.e. pre-Internet) forms of mass media.

According to Gabler, some of the societal trends that are working against the movie business as we currently understand it are

•An ever more fragmented, segmented audience,
•A growing disinterest in going out to a movie theater,
•Public fascination about celebrities' lives overshadowing movies that they act in,
•And a desire by viewers to be at the center of the action as they are in video games and YouTube videos.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #19




***SHHH! DON'T TELL MOM I'M AN INTERNATIONAL CELEBRITY: Yesterday's West magazine (which is inserted in the Sunday Times) had a cover article entitled The Secret Life of Cory Kennedy that, to me at least, just perfectly captures how the Internet is changing everything from how celebrities are created to parenting in the digital age. It seems that Santa Monica teenager Cory Kennedy became an Internet phenomenon and was hanging out with the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan before her parents really noticed anything was up. The article is a fun and illuminating read.