Writers’ strike tops “moments of significance” list
By fred | December 28, 2007
For months now writers have been explaining the reasons they’re striking, and many figures have told on different occasion that it wasn’t as greedy AMPTP liars would like to have you believe about writers trying to get even more rich, not was it just about money.
I mean sure, it is about the money. But further than that, it’s about the whole industry of television changing shapes and evolving into a new reality, a digital reality in which viewers will not watch their content sitting in their home, but on their phones - which will be so much more than actually just phones - or they’ll download it on their computer.
And the strike is about preparing deals so that workers responsible for great, quality television in the first place can actually still exists tomorrow, with the new ways content will be distributed, because tomorrow has never been so close than it is today.
And another reflection of the high importance of the strike came when it was revealed that it came first on the American Film Institute’s list of “moments of significance” that have had an impact on the moving image in the past year.
Describing the strike as “part of a larger paradigm shift“, the AFI said the labor battle is part of “the ongoing digital revolution (that) has upended conventional economic models, and uncertainty abounds when attempting to project how an audience will receive its storytelling in the years to come and how creators will be paid for their work“.
And given how the consequences of the strike will have an enormous impact of the television of the future, a very near future, the strike logically came first even before the birth of the iPhone - another sign of the on-going evolution, and “symbol of a public that demands its content where they want it and when they want it” - the summer programming on basic cable, playing another part in redefining the traditional TV season, or the hyper-tabloidization of TV news…
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