Last week I walked five blocks to my favorite neighborhood cafe, managed to snag one of the “good” tables (near an outlet and a window, not too small), switched a couple of chairs around so I could sit on one that wasn’t wobbly, bought my Americano, and settled in to get lots of work done. But I couldn’t get on the Internet. No one around me could get on the Internet. And several people had asked cafe employees to restart the router several times. No one could figure out what the problem was. I ended up quickly drinking my coffee then packing up and walking home. A good hour, gone.
A few days later I went back to that cafe, and a barista told me what the problem had been: Some numskull was downloading a movie! Clueless or just selfish? Who knows. The point is that this whole movie downloading thing isn’t what you’d call a breeze. At least not yet.
But it’s still on everyone’s radars. The Sunday New York Times had three articles on the topic: “The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse,” “The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You’re Patient,” and “Little Films on Little Screens.”
I wish the dude at the cafe had read the piece by Manohla Dargis (”The Revolution Will Be Downloaded”) before he screwed with the wireless network a couple dozen people were trying to access. Here’s a paragraph:
When all the planets are aligned and your computer has enough memory and hasn’t been deluged with spam for lots of little multicolored pills, it will function just dandy. But try to download without enough disk space and through a wireless connection, as I initially did, and you may soon wonder why you’re spending so much time and energy to watch films you’ve never heard of on your computer rather than watching a “Children of Men” DVD on your dreamy big television.
True enough.
And here are some bits from A. O. Scott’s article (”The Shape of Cinema”):
It is now possible to imagine–to expect–that before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars….
…you have the potential of tens of thousands of movies competing for the burdened attention of the viewers…. How will they be sorted out? How will you know which ones you might want to see?
A.O. Scott, who says the question is asked out of plain-old curiosity, not out of fear that the professional critic is a waning vocation, ends up basically answering it later in the article:
It has become something of a truism that Web culture is driven not by traditional, top-down forms of tastemaking like the judgments of professional critics or the strategies of corporate marketers, but rather by the lateral operations of social networks.
…What will guide those choices? Will the social networks that drive taste on the Web discover new and neglected works? Will they manage to circumvent both relentless marketing and criticial myopia? If the short history of the Internet teaches anything, it’s that any decisive, early answer is sure to be wrong.
These are good questions for everyone at spout.com–employees and community members alike. The website was certainly created with those intentions–to help people sort through the “Long Tail,” to point to good movies that might be overlooked, and to listen to the opinions of real people, not marketing experts. But as with any community, the people who are in it ultimately determine the direction. We’re as eager as A.O. Scott to see what happens.
I still don’t get the deal with these “virtual worlds” the kids are all into today, but apparently someone at Paramount Pictures is hip enough to 
