Movie Theatres, Newspapers, and Pay Phones

In an essay in the most recent issue of the New Yorker, David Denby discusses the possible demise of the movie theatre, and with it the movie as a public experience. No more will one enter a private world of fantasy in the company of fifty strangers in this possible future. Instead, one will watch movies on DVD players, iPods, and laptops, alone or with friends. There is a real difference. Of the movie-theatre experience, Denby writes:

We have just entered from the impersonal streets, and suddenly we are alone but not alone, the sighing and shifting all around us hitting us like the pressures of the weather in an open field. The movie theatre is a public space that encourages private pleasures: as we watch, everything we are—our senses, our past, our unconscious—reaches out onto the screen.

The movie theatre, along with the pay phone and the newspaper, seems to be a threatened garrison of the community. It has been, like the pay phone, a resource for the public. And, as the cell phone has virtually wiped out pay phones and the Internet threatens to wipe out newspapers, portable DVD players and the like threaten to wipe out the movie theatre.

These changes are probably not so much a threat to the community as a change in its shape, however. As Mark Taylor argues in The Moment of Complexity, we are moving from a culture of Taylorist assembly lines to a culture of networks. Where the industrialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries necessitated well-defined, linear spaces, the information age depends on complex systems largely independent of space.

Whereas walls divide and seclude in an effort to impose order and control, webs link and relate, entangling everyone in multiple, mutating, and mutually defining connections in which nobody is really in control. As connections proliferate, change accelerates, bringing everything to the edge of chaos. This is the moment of complexity.

We conduct our business in teleconferences and online, we form social networks online, we watch the first part of a movie on our laptops in one city and watch the rest in another city. In place of physical spaces, we begin to inhabit virtual spaces, sometimes developing extraordinary feelings about these virtual spaces. Grady Hendrix writes, in an essay for n+1, about entire social lives formed within Azeroth, a fantasy world in a "Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game."

When Qiu Chengwei, a Chinese gamer playing “Legend of Mir 3,” a fantasy MMORPG, asked his friend to hold onto a virtual sword for him, the friend turned around and sold it. Qiu went to the police but they could do nothing – legally, the sword didn’t exist . . . . Enraged over losing what he viewed as a valuable possession, he stabbed his friend to death.

The advantages of a network culture are clear. In a network culture, we are relatively free of the constraints of place, we have vast amounts of information available to us, and the opportunities for artistic expression and innovation seem boundless. While we may miss the experience of seeing Citizen Kane on the big screen, we are able to watch it with scholarly commentary on DVD, and to see Welles's lesser-known works—works that would never make it to the theatre.

There is still the problem that we are physical beings who will always be dependent on our physical environment and local institutions, however. We live in cities, hamlets, and suburbs, and our quality of life is dependent on the state of these places. In a network culture, people move around like nomads, and no one feels any natural responsibility for their environs. What do I care about the degradation of our Watershed? I'm likely to move to New York, where the water comes clean and pure from the Catskills, before it gets bad. What do I care whether public education declines or improves in Philadelphia? If I ever have children, I'll likely raise them Massachusetts or New York.