Criticism Online

I'm an English PhD student and I'll admit that from a financial standpoint I've chosen the wrong career path. But I did not choose it for the promise of riches, but rather for the love of ideas and art.  I do it because I love it. But, the material realities of my life demand a certain level of financial stability (gotta pay those bills). Talk of career prospects in humanities  graduate departments tends to be highly pessimistic.  Our professors encourage us further in advanced degrees, yet warn of the hard road ahead.  Few tenured teaching positions at universities, few publishers interested in converting your dissertation on medieval literature into a book, few editorial positions at scholarly print journals.  We dread the coming day of graduation with anxious thoughts about the Death of the University, the Death of the Scholar.  "No one is reading anymore!," we lament and complain, blaming the problem on a disinterested public.


Today I attended a film screening and director Q & A of For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism.  The documentary traces the history of film criticism, considering how American film criticism developed through newspapers and small journals and essential built a national critical interest in film.  The writer and director, Gerald Perry, an established film critic in the Boston area, ends the film considering the state of film criticism in the present.  Perry mourns the termination of many film critic positions at major newspapers throughout the nation, citing the present moment as the beginning of the end of film criticism as we know it. Perry gestures to the developing online film criticism community, considering how blogs have broadly opened up the ground of film criticism where experts and nonexperts alike can post their take on film. Yet, though Perry admits the democractic potential to this move online, he fears that the quality of film criticism has taken a hit. Part of this decline is reasonably financial; how do you attract good reviewers if they are unpaid? During the Q&A, I asked, how might we develop new models of financial sponsorshop for film reviewers, so that essentially film critics could be paid for their work like in days past.  Perry's answer was a brand of the all too familiar pessimism, the doom and gloom of the end. His advice, "get a day job," is realistic, but uncritical. If we all believed there was no way to develop film criticism as a profession in the digital age, then yes, let's seal the coffin of criticism with the last newspaper printed and all retire in scholary recluse.  

But, I refuse this pessimism. The Internet is an incredibly exciting developing community of ideas, conversation, information, and criticism. The public is reading, watching, commenting, sharing, creating. The possibility to create and share on the Internet is open and seemingly limitless.  Yet, as scholars and 'experts' in training, many of us have yet to really embrace the potential of this new medium of publication and distribution.   Our older professors will continue to lament about the Death of Print and count down the days until criticism as we know it ends. We have the choice of occupying these passing models, or we can create new models that fit the digital paradigms of our age.  Criticism can thrive online. There are readers out there, its just a matter of writing to them in the mediums they use.  Our generation of scholars are the ones who will need to develop criticism online. We have the critical tools, the voice, the knowledge. We need to learn how to share it.  But, and this is an important but, we need to also develop alternative models of sponsorship for digital publication.  Payment for our work will not just appear out of nowwhere, its up to bright minds to develop new systems of publication and sponsorship for the arts. 

For these reasons, I'd like to develop an online graduate student run journal that can carry the quality of criticism we admire in academic print journals, but is adaptative to the digital age.  Featuring critical essays, book and film reviews, blogs, research bibliographies and web resources, this online journal would be an experiment in developing best practices for criticism in the digital age.  The moment is ripe. It is up to us to take it.




Interested in developing an online journal?  Join the Digital Humanities Working Group (open to anyone)!