The great director Steven Soderbergh delivered a passionate speech about the current state of the movie business recently, quoting Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff as he laid out the problems facing the industry.
Storytellers of all kind should watch this speech (embedded above) or read the Awards Daily transcript, it examines how audiences are changing in the 21st Century. Check it out:
I got my hands on a book by Douglas Rushkoff, and realized that I’m suffering from something called “Present Shock,” which is the name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: “When there’s no linear time, how’s a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way they are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result, instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. There’s so much information coming from everyone, from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time.” So that’s sort of the hum that I’m talking about and I mention this because I think it’s having an effect on all of us. It’s having an effect on our culture, and I think it’s having an effect on movies. How they’re made, how they’re sold and how they perform. (Link via)