Critics and Media

I recently got a job in an area not surprisingly related with this class. For the last month or so I have been writing music reviews for the Chicago-based blog (“Web publication” as it says on my resume) Gapers Block. Doing this made me consider a unique medium that I believe we overlooked in the beginning of the quarter: that of the critic.

The critic is in a unique position because it is understandably both an audience and a producer of media. They are an audience obviously because they take in the media, but they are separate from others because their absorption of media is colored by the fact that they have to actively critique and write something about it for their own audience. They are certainly not Adorno’s passive audience, but they are a separate kind of active audience because their participation is also for their own media production and gain.

Critics also produce their own unique media. It is a secondary form of media in that it is not the actual production of art, but media produced about art. It does have its own audience, however, making it a unique form of media. I probably read more critique-based media (Op-Eds, music magazines, blogs) on a regular basis than any other form of media (except, of course, listening to music). This is interesting when you think of the fact that this time could be spent absorbing the media I am reading about instead of spending the time reading the critique. Does this concept mute the active audience because they are getting their ideas about media from an outside source or are they that much more active because it puts audiences in dialog?

Critics exist solely because of the world so saturated by media. They would not exists to such a degree if we didn’t have media in such a prominent place in our lives.

These various ramblings are just ideas that came to mind as I begin to see myself as a part of this unique form of media.