"Novelty May Be the New Narcissism"

"What this points to is that movies may have become a kind of 'MacGuffin'—an excuse for communication along with music, social updates, friends' romantic complications and the other things young people use to stoke interaction and provide proof that they are in the loop. A film's intrinsic value may matter less than its ability to be talked about. In any case, old movies clearly cannot serve this community-building function as they once did. More, the immediacy of social networking, a system in which one tweet supplants another every millisecond, militates against anything that is 10 minutes old, much less 10 years."

In the Los Angeles Times, Neal Gabler worries about a decline in film knowledge.