Neal Gabler writes that the internet:
not only creates niche communities — of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics — that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: narcissism.
To which Robert Young responds:
What Gabler calls “narcissism,” I prefer to use the term “digital self expression”.
Narcissism indeed. The inventor of pay-per-click advertising is asking his readers to equate a Hollywood historian’s contention that modern America is narcissistic with his own contention that digital self expression is a new industry. I won’t pretend to speak for Mr. Gabler but unless I’m mistaken the “modern America” he’s referring to is commonly understood to have begun in the late 1860s, following the post-Civil War Reconstruction. I’m pretty sure that puts the origins of modern America’s narcissism just a few years before the rise of digital media.
And even if we allow that the rise of modern American attitudes and the rise of digital media are close to each other on the timeline, let’s please not contend that narcissism and digital self expression are two terms that essentially point to the same thing. That’s either a truly depressing or a truly terrifying prospect, depending on how you look at it.
