According to Nick Carr:
Jon Pareles, the New York Times rock critic, has a nicely balanced piece today surveying the various crosscurrents roiling today’s media markets…
Yet over at Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis weighs has a different take, castigating Pareles for not having faith:
Choice is good, not something to be lamented. Indeed, I find it ironic that a critic, of all people, should be complaining about choice. Choice is precisely what necessitates criticism.
Fortunately Suw Charman already knows the answer, over at Strange Attractor:
we don’t need gatekeepers anymore. We don’t need people who stand between us and our stuff, deciding what to tell us about and what to ignore. We don’t need arbiters of taste. There are so many blogs out there reviewing software and web apps and films and books and every other sort of creativity that we don’t need to rely on the media’s old gatekeepers telling us what we should like.
We do, however, still need help. There’s just too much stuff around for us to know what’s out there, to keep up with what’s good, what works for us, what is worth investigation. What we need are curators. And we need them badly.
There are day when I rather enjoy this brave new world we’ve conjured up 🙂