“THIS. MEANS. WAR.”

…so pre-Tanya Harding rich-titch “Natalie” spat at baby-faced and thoroughly crimped dancefloor sirens Shannen Doherty, Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. The trio, mischievous and contrarian, shat on Natalie’s super-sweet-16, in the form of fake invites sent to previously uninvited Twisted Sister fans, and also a blueberry pie in Natalie’s fat-pocket pops’ silver weave. The lesson: you just have to laugh in the face of mfucers who think they know you, who think they can best you, because that way you get their goat. Good may only sometimes prevail, word to JK Rowling, but Girls taught me – when I was but a young girl bearing no discernable parental figures but steady-rocking a shit-hot boob toob – the best way to piss off any evil person is to giggle in their face… (and, if situations require, boom! get their boyfriend! especially if he is your partner in the citywide dance-off!)
My point is: I will unroll my Sephora-is-killing-magazines analogy point by point, day by day, until the idea exhausts itself.
Over the past approximately four years, I have been privy to a number of showdowns (nee: meetings) between representatives of what they’re now calling “traditional media” and what they should stop calling “new media.” In many cases, new media people devalue the trappings of traditional media (i.e. “stories” that are “written” in the classic sense of the word) because in new media, aka the internet, everyone has a voice, it is a populist exchange of ideas, everyone can be a “star” (that part is when my acid reflux kicks in). On the other end, some traditional media people necessarily blanche at this notion, because: a. print mags are just so touchable! and b. is the role of the critic, the trained journalist, the specialist dead? Who will cherrypick from this supposedly broad-representation of the populace, where is the quality control? Would you let a candy-striper perform surgery on your brain? And what will become of the culture if the opinion of Johnny Tom-Bob over in Des Moines – who has never seen the entire oeuvre of Spider-mans but thinks part III is dogshit – is given the same weight as Spider-man connaisseur Anthony Lane? BOO-YAH!
I personally sit in the middle – i think there’s both gross elitism and truth to the notion of “not everyone can do this” -this meaning the combo of cajones, drive, talent, narcissism and editing it takes to sculpt a strategic mag-ready piece- and am both excited (as a lover of both equality and free shit) and slightly dismayed because, like, if the opinions of a thousand Johnny Tom-Bobs are available free on the internet, I definitely have a sparkling future as a shot girl at the fake Irish pub around the corner. The main concern is economics: if a thousand people on myspace are willing to blog about shit for free, rendering previously employed writer types expendable, then who gets the money from the web-whatever? I’ll tell you: ONE 19-YEAR-OLD HARVARD UNDERGRAD WITH SCURVY, and/or A CONSORTIUM OF UNDEAD WALL STREETERS and/ or THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT.
The rift between these apparently warring thoughts/philosophies, though, is the five-alarm freakout that most magazines have been petey-pablo-helicoptering for the past year, and “new/not new” media is totally winning, for now, or at least that’s the perception by stakeholders and those all-white-suits-but-never-white-parties who only read Forbes online, anyway. Perhaps erroneously – there are more problems with this but, as I write, I’m starting to feel the weight of my own tedium. If anyone gives a flying feerrljkaslkjasdfl, I’ll continue this train of thought in a second post. Until then, WORD OF ADVICE TO ALL – learn HTML to tide you over until net boom 2.0 implodes, si? TILL THEN, I’LL BE THAT FREAKONOMICS BITCH SERVING YOU AMSTELS. TALLY-HASSEE HO!
*yes, I know my writing this for free defeats my “thesis.”