Comments on: Garrison Keillor’s 1996 Predictions for the Future of Media

By: Amos Humiston

Amos Humiston — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:32:11 +0000

News flash for Matt Novak: Ad dollars have not traveled from the print realm to digital. Nobody makes money off digital. The problem is that eyeballs have traveled to digital for the sake of convenience and free content, but advertising has been slow to follow. One of the ironies as we pass from the Deadtree Era to the Plastic-Gadget Landfill Era.

By: vel

vel — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 15:36:30 +0000

I don’t know. Keillor has some other rather silly conservative fantasies so his “get over it” seems rather amusing and not in a flattering way to his own actions.

By: Abe

Abe — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 08:44:08 +0000

@MrG

I’m pretty glad of the “fall” of celebrities. We live in an age were everyone can create and find the content THEY want, not whatever society at large happens to be interested in. Not everyone may be nostalgic over the same thing, but isn’t diversity a good thing? Always something new to discover, times gone pass still present new things to different people. I don’t see how making everyone listen to the same bands, watch the same movies, and gossip over the same celebrities is a positive thing. Of course my perspective might be different as I’m only 20, a child of the digital age where as most people commenting seem to be more my parent’s age.

By: Fiery

Fiery — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 01:50:10 +0000

I went to the Deseret News link to read the original article, and I was completely with you on your interpretation of Keillor’s attitude–until the last line:

“I say, forget it. Just get over it. There’s the future out there. Go live it.”

Seems like a good idea to read an article all the way to the end before judging the author’s attitude. The last line finally reveals that he’s poking a bit of fun at those attitudes himself.

By: Mike Flugennock

Mike Flugennock — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:54:42 +0000

Current pop culture is “trash”. Well, duuhhhh. Look back at the pop culture of pretty much any era in the last century and, sadly, you’ll find that at least 90% of it is trash — even the ’60s, the era of my boyhood and pre-adolescence, which I consider a golden era of pop culture. Hell, I didn’t have to wait 20 years to know that ’70s pop culture was trash. Needless to say, of course, Keillor’s own “Prairie Home Companion”, a radio show as dull as a beige room, isn’t trash.

Keillor also seems to have an overly romanticized vision — and unhealthy importance attached to — celebrities. Once again, look back at any era of the last century, and you’ll find that maybe three quarters of the famous people were talentless losers who were famous just for being famous. Even during the precious ’60s of my childhood, musicians as talented as The Beatles or The Grateful Dead were easily outnumbered by derivative opportunist hacks looking to ride their coattails.

If it seems that our era is overrun with useless “celebrities”, it’s only because there are so many more media outlets — between YouTube, American Idol and several hundred cable channels full of reality shows, the current media environment is generating more famous talentless losers than we can possibly handle.

This one bit of Keillor’s rambling especially got a giggle out of me…

“People will feel nostalgia for celebrities, real ones, like there used to be back when there were three TV networks and Americans watched the same shows at the same time and talked about them the next day at work. Television was common currency. Sunday afternoons you watched the NFL game with your dad on the couch and then you went to the table and ate pot roast and mashed potatoes…”

…yeah, yeah, and the kids were all above average.

Whatever, Garrison.

By: mrG

mrG — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:09:28 +0000

oh, here, I’ll save you having to hunt that up, because it is a great essay on the topic of yesteryear’s visions of our today: http://imomus.com/index499.html

By: mrG

mrG — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:08:10 +0000

He has a point with celebrity, though, about the nostalgia for what was once a much more unifying force than it can be today. There can never be a “next Beatles” because the 1964 fab four was known even to people who could care less, even to people who’s tastes would never go near Beatlemania, but it was inescapable simply because there were only so many channels. Today, I live in a small town of 20,000 and it is nearly impossible to get one unified message across here locally; to get a message out to “all youth” is unthinkable!

This was famously predicted by Momus in 1991, his landmark essay, “Pop Stars? Nein danke” subtitled, “In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people” and THAT is a future present that I can really identify with.