What the awful Woody Allen scandal says about pre- and post-internet media culture

摘要

One stray detail that's emerged amidst the Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow saga: Allen doesn't go online. As Robert B. Weide, director of the 2011 PBS documentary "Woody Allen: A Documentary," wrote in his highly viral late-January Daily Beast post titled "The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast," Allen only emails by proxy, via his assistant; he still pounds out missives on a manual typewriter. An innocuous but telling detail-and one that paints a picture of a 78-year-old man in a bubble, both isolated from and subject to the minute-by-minute obsessions of a web-centric public. As Allen has been busy pecking away on his Olympia SM-3 for the past six decades-it's reportedly the only typewriter he's ever owned-the media culture around him has changed so drastically as to be, in many ways, unrecognizable.