"Anticipation Is So Much Better"

"As a reader in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as a writer (for Melody Maker) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I recall the way that any striking stance or provocative idea would trigger both complementary and opposing views in the next issue. Allies took the baton and ran further with it, while rivals and enemies took violent exception. That still happens on the Internet, with Tumblrs and tweets, but in a much more accelerated and ephemeral way. A week feels to me like the ideal interval for the formulation of a considered response. 
"With its superfluity of options, its decentralized focus, and the blurring of past and present into what William Gibson calls 'atemporality,' the Internet stokes a restless, distracted, omnivorous music libido, the opposite of the intense and lasting attachment fans gave to a single generation-defining band like Joy Division or Nirvana, or to a movement like punk or rave. "


Simon Reynolds in The Pitchfork Review contrasts music journalism, then and now.