Critics have been locked in debate over the Internet’s effect on cultural production and reception for as long as most millennials can remember, exclamations like “democratized content” and “death of the novel” appearing at every click and turn. In this week’s New York Times “Bookends” column, two writers discuss whether dated categories are still applicable to a cultural conversation that draws on media high and low, in which both elites and “the masses” take part.
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See David Reynolds’ book Beneath the American Renaissance. He contends that Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, et. al., were not lonely iconoclasts but greatly influenced by low brow culture, including dime novels and penny magazines. That divide, actually, became far more pronounced after the Civil War when mass circulations newspapers made the divide more clear, as in New York Post vs. New York Times. With print journalism on the decline, however, perhaps the lines will again become not so clear.
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