the magic of meeting new people, being exposed to new stuff? Crazy random happenstance? Not sure how that is going to happen.

Umm... there's an app for that?

I remember a poster on TT long, long ago talking about how ecstatically different the experience was the first time he saw a Preston Sturges comedy on a big screen in a fairly crowded theater -- he'd seen the entire canon on late-night PBS and the old AMC and on scritchy little screens in the media section of his grad school library, and he had a loving, reverent appreciation for how breathtakingly whipsmart and pointed Sturges could be, but when he saw it in a theater full of smart but slightly different people, all cracking up at slightly different things and everyone's giddy laughter getting everyone else going, he found himself laughing so hard his entire midsection was sore the next day.

The Alamo Drafthouse woman and her ilk are a definite, hideous hazard in a group moviegoing experience, but when it's good it can be so very good.

My drop everything movies are Velvet Goldmine and Bring it On.

Yes! These, plus Beautiful Thing, A Room With A View, and Dr. Strangelove.

I saw Super 8 and X-Men: FC this weekend. Loved them both.

I like seeing comedies and blockbusters with a group. The energy is part of the experience. Smaller films I will go see in the theater to support indie cinema, but they can be ruined for me by rude patrons.

the magic of meeting new people, being exposed to new stuff? Crazy random happenstance? Not sure how that is going to happen.

In terms of your second question, I get exposed to new music more often through Pandora than I ever did in a music store - I wasn't ever a devoted enough browser to try random things. I have watched more new movies since getting Netflix Instant Queue than ever before as well, and my Kindle has made me much more likely to try whole new generes of fiction. I used to think that without physical bookstores I wouldn't get the same "browse for something random" experience, but my last visits to Barnes and Nobles have made me realize that the experience there is carefully crafted to be just as commercial and limited as the Amazon Bestsellers Lists / Recommendations for You. I get most of my good recommendations for new things to try the same way I always have: friends, coworkers, random people on TV, and internet forums. I don't think that the loss of traditional media outlets changes that.

As to the fist and third parts, I don't think that changing the way we access and imbibe media is going to change the social nature of humans. People need to meet each other, and they find ways to do it. Random happenstance is called that because it is random, and can happen as easily at the grocery store, the Starbucks, or the bagel place as the comic book store.

Or on the internet, right?

what's going to happen to comic book stores then?

DC seems to be trying to minimize the impact on stores: [link] The same-day release doesn't thrill owners, but as they mention, the price for digital will be the same as hard copy initially, and only drop a month after release. It’s certainly not going to do anything to the collectors’ market, which is kind of a shame.

Plus... maybe they've updated the apps since I last looked at them, but I thought they were horrible for browsing. There's no "preview," just the cover and a blurb. If you know exactly what you want already, I guess it's fine, but I can't imagine spending $3-4 to try a new title if I can't even see a few pages of the art first.

Granted, I'm pretty far from the target audience for the reboot anyway, but I think the digital side is more likely to appeal to people who don't have a local shop anyway, or those want to catch up on back issues.

In terms of your second question, I get exposed to new music more often through Pandora than I ever did in a music store - I wasn't ever a devoted enough browser to try random things. I have watched more new movies since getting Netflix Instant Queue than ever before as well, and my Kindle has made me much more likely to try whole new genres of fiction.

I'm sure these are common experiences and definitely point up the advantages of the all access digital world. The whole Pandora algorithm neatly does the things you might get from a good record store geek, without the snotty attitude.

I'm more interested in the flattening of value of things when everything's available. OTOH, that's a virtue, in that simple market forces of supply and demand can't make some worthy bit of music unavailable because collectors have snapped up the only available copies.

There's something more subtle (I think) going on, though, where because things come to you, then you don't have to go to the works. Not just physically, but emotionally/intellectually.

Obviously, the new approach makes it much more easy for you to explore new books (Kindle) and movies (Netflix) and songs (iTunes). But several articles I read today noted the virtue of only having 20 records in your collection but knowing them deeply, completely, inside and out. Every lyric and every nuance of the song's production.

Which is different from flitting from playlist to playlist, trying to find something to match your mood or change your mood. There's less investment in some ways. It's not inherent. You can certainly buy Demon Days and listen to it through and through, day after day. But that experience becomes less common.

Each cultural event becomes less an expression of an individual creator that requires some movement/effort on your part, and it trends to becoming a commodified event solely to satisfy your expectations.

There's something of that creeping sense of entitlement that some teachers and staff have noted here about younger students. The expectation that not only will all needs be met, but all wants as well.

Certainly there's nothing wrong with anybody deriving satisfaction from their books or movies or music. That's why we read and listen and watch. But the very plenitude (I suspect) may be dulling in some way. I certainly don't think that's the end-game for our culture. I would guess that it requires different kinds of institutions. That something like Mark Reads is a blueprint for a 21st century salon.

I personally love movie theatres, though the talking, cell phones and general rudeness make it harder to love. It's probably not a coincidence that all my favourite communal viewing experiences were in independent rep theatres.

Two examples: 1) Seeing Three Colours: White in Vancouver. There was a large Polish contingent in the theatre who laughed at a lot of references the rest of us did not get. One joke about faking the circumstances of a death by having the character seem to be decapitated by a train really set them off into gales of laughter. We laughed because they laughed, but I still don't know why.

2) Again in Vancouver (it's a great city for film-going), at a jam-packed screen of A Brief History of Time at the Ridge, a 800-seat theatre. The movie had already started and some guy was wondering the theatre saying "Bob?", "Bob?" Instead of grumbling, most people giggled. And when Bob finally replied, "Over here!," the whole audience applauded.

Also, some movies just work better in theatres. Fellini's Satyricon is one I had to watch on VHS fro a film class that just bored and confused me. Then I saw it again at a Fellini retrospective in Vancouver. There was one sequence where my mouth was hanging opening for the brilliance of it. I bought the DVD a few years later and tried to watch it again, but a TV screen can't seem to transmit its genius. I was once again bored, if less confused.