There was a time when novelists wrote novels, historians history, philosophers philosophy, and Freud his Totem and Taboo. There was a time when composers composed concertos and symphonies, ballerinas danced on fanciful stages, jugglers and lion tamers paraded in circuses, sculptors sculpted, and Claude Monet stood next to his Impression, Sunrise on April 15, 1874, at the Exposition des Impressionnistes in Paris, waiting for the art critics to evaluate his revolutionary painting. There was a time when people anticipated going to the theater, or opera, or the grand premiere of Gone with the Wind on December 15, 1939, when 300,000 people gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, for the festivities and waited to catch a glimpse of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. There was a time when people lived in anticipation: when they waited for the newsboy to toss the rolled newspaper onto the doorstep, when they counted the days for the traveling theater or circus to reach their village, when they refreshed the radio dial to listen to the weekly broadcast of their favorite program, when families gathered in front of the TV on Thursday nights for Cheers, settling into their sofas before the familiar piano theme began and the whole household fell silent to catch every line from Sam and Diane, knowing there would be no pause, no replay, no streaming later. There was a time when creativity in all fields of life was channeled in a few well-defined fields delineated by centuries of convention, and when the things we enjoyed were part of our physical environment, three-dimensional, palpable: We could touch the elephant at the circus, congratulate the ballerina after the play, buy Monet’s painting and take it home.
This era is now gone. It is vanishing in real time in front of our very eyes. Who reads an op-ed or a book nowadays, or goes to the theater or cinema? Who goes to an art gallery or eagerly waits for a radio or TV show to begin? Perhaps some still do – but they no longer define the cultural mainstream. Gradually, everything is moving to the web, morphing into a new digital world that competes with the real world for our attention. Most crucially, the old citadels of culture – newspaper editorial boards, radio and television networks with their traditional and limited time slots, publishing houses with their guarded gates – are giving way to the new digital media and social networks. The arbiters of taste who once decided what deserved ink, airtime, or shelf space now see their authority diluted in a marketplace that no longer recognizes pedigree. This is a new era where everything is becoming digital content to be consumed.
A big round of applause to this new reality! Let us welcome …
The Era of Content Creators!
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