Christopher Weingarten speaks about the internet and the death of music criticism at the 140 Characters conference. We are about the same age, but in weird ways, it’s like he’s from a generation ahead of me. Christopher says a lot of smart things in this; there’s quite a lot to unpack. Watch, listen, think about it. He is a tremendously entertaining man and should maybe do more public speaking engagements.I wasn’t entirely convinced by this to start off with, but I persisted and eventually liked a lot of what he’s saying. Particularly this bit from about 7 minutes onwards:
“I can always learn about stuff that’s important to me, that’s easy. I wanna learn about stuff that ISN’T important to me, I wanna be exposed to things! Crowdsourcing killed punk rock, hands down. Crowdsourcing kills art. Crowdsourcing killed indie rock. It’s bullshit. You wanna know why? ‘Cos crowds have TERRIBLE TASTE…”
This is why mods at Whedonesque work hard to keep the noise down and separate the gold from the muck.
This is why crowd sourcing needs editors.
