NOTE:This article has been edited from a previous version.

It may be the most significant social change to ever happen in such a short time. Because of digital technologies and their dizzying rate of evolution, much of what we once took for granted ? including our institutions, business models and brains themselves ? are being radically reconfigured. Nowhere is this more apparent, drastic and crucial than in the realm of pop culture. If the digital revolution has facilitated a completely new relationship with our old media, those media themselves must adapt or die.

In the coming weeks, Geoff Pevere will investigate these seismic shifts ? for both industries and consumers ? in four erupting areas: film, music, books and TV.

First part, the movies.

* * * * *

A couple of months ago, Atom Egoyan went to the movies with his 17-year-old son Arshile. Their choice was The Social Network , a movie about how Facebook changed not only the lives of those who launched it but the world it was launched into.

They saw it in a megaplex, one of those all-in entertainment complexes that hastened the oblivion of just about every other kind of movie theatre in the mid-’90s. It’s also the place that, more than anything else, helped the movie exhibition business stave off extinction in the digital age. It’s the primary reason we still actually go the movies at a time when technology could just as easily bring the movies to us.

Egoyan, who is 50 years old and one of the most famous filmmakers this country has produced, was alarmed by his moviegoing experience.

Not by the film, which he enjoyed. By the audience.

“The way people were talking to each other, like absolutely out loud, having conversations as though there was no sense of this as an experience that needed a degree of respect or consideration, was amazing,” he says. “It was as though they were watching in their living room.”

For Egoyan, this signified more than a shift in people’s moviegoing etiquette. He suspects a fundamental change in the way people think of “the cinema.”

“People were not respecting it as a cinema experience as I understood it,” he explains. “They were talking, they were texting each other, there were all these other sources of light in that room.

“The cinema is about one single source of light, projected on a screen, and people being absorbed in this almost atavistic way, in this Platonic notion of a cave.”

* * *

If the caves are rowdier, does it necessarily follow that the cave dwellers have devolved?

Egoyan isn’t alone in wondering. Digital media have not only created a world starkly different from the world of a mere 15 years ago, they have changed the way people who live in the world think, behave, create and consume.

They have facilitated a generation gap that makes the divide between Boomers and their parents narrow by comparison, and they have accelerated the pace of cultural and political change to something like warp speed. In this world, The Social Network , set in 2004, can seem like the Dark Ages.

This is not hype. The future has arrived more quickly that most people were prepared for, and the consequences of this abrupt collision with tomorrow will likely not be fully understood for generations to come. Meanwhile, this much is certain: culturally, we’re not even in the same solar system as Kansas anymore.

“We believe the world has reached a critical turning point,” writes Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in Macrowikinomics , a book that situates changing cultural industries as central to the new digital era. “Reboot all the old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or collapse.”

Neurologically, the reboot has already occurred, write Dr. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan in iBrain: Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind : “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

And not simply in the way you may think: “Rather than simply catching ‘Digital ADD,’ ” write Small and Vorgan, “many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed concentration.

“Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now ? at a speed like never before,” they write.

Nowhere has this shift been more dramatic than in popular culture. The old models for the creation, production and dissemination of these things have virtually collapsed in the past decade. The industries producing music, movies, TV, books and news have seen their paradigms not merely shift but explode, and each is scrambling to re-define itself for a future where the only thing from the past that applies is our passion for pleasure.

This is a key point. For all that is changing neurologically, socially and institutionally, content is constant. As the University of Southern California’s Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide , “History teaches us that old media never die ? and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content.”

But tools change their users.

“If old consumers were isolated individuals, the new consumers are more socially connected,” Jenkins writes. “If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, the new consumers are now noisy and public.”

Few people have given more thought nor spoken more widely on the subject of digital cultural rupture than Tapscott, a business strategy consultant. He describes a “generation lap” in which, for the first time in history, kids are more expert in navigating the informational environment than their parents.

The implications are huge: We’re looking at generations with different brain skills, generations who view and engage with the world differently, and the end of the mass media industries as we knew them. Movies, for instance, were created in the era of what Tapscott calls “one-to-many media.”

“What we’ve got now is the antithesis of that,” he explains. “It’s a media that’s one-to-one and many-to-many. It’s highly distributed and decentralized. It’s not controllable and as such it has an awesome neutrality. It will be what we want it to be.”

“This new media,” he adds, “doesn’t understand the rules that you’re supposed to play by. When information is no longer atoms and becomes bits, content, whether music or a movie or whatever, doesn’t know that it shouldn’t be infinitely reproduced and fly around the world at the speed of light. And this is turning all of these traditional industrial-age media industries on their heads.”

Piracy is one result. But that’s only the iceberg-tip of a much deeper shift in values. When people have grown up expecting instant access to just about anything; when they’ve grown accustomed to getting it free and having a participatory role in it, they are fundamentally different media users than their parents. As a result all entertainment media ? TV, music, publishing and graphic arts ? are on the wild frontier.

* * * * *

It’s a Saturday afternoon at the megaplex, mid-life for a new release.

Since the mid-1970s, when the staggering success of Jaws and Star Wars compelled the movie industry to re-think its entire release strategy, opening-weekend box office has become the equivalent of the Roman emperor’s thumb. Because other exhibition platforms ? DVD, pay-per-view, Netflix, piracy ? have so dramatically shortened a movie’s theatrical shelf life, the average release has to click instantly to be counted a success.

It’s a process that began in the 1980s, with the widespread use of home video viewing technology and the proliferation of those shoebox-sized multi-screen facilities called the multiplex. That was the industry’s first response to the corrosive competition caused by the VCR. The megaplex was the next generation: bigger, brighter, better and buff. It was built to defend its terrain.

All the same, the days where you actually needed to “go to the show,” as my grandparents called it, are gone. With the click of a button, the show will come to you.

And that raises questions.

Like: what has this done to the industry, since so much control has shifted from producer to consumer?

Like: what has this done to the medium, since filmmakers now make films that are as likely to be viewed in the back seat of a car as the twelfth-row centre of a movie theatre?

Like: just what are we talking about when we talk about the movie “audience”?

Like: How can the go-to-the-show tradition ever compete with an entertainment universe as vast, convenient and cheap as the touch-pad delivery system?

And, most mysteriously, why do people bother going to movies at all any more, especially when they’ll come to you faster than microwave popcorn?

Because they do. In 2009, a record $10.6 billion (U.S.) was generated at the box office in Canada and United States, while almost $30 billion was made worldwide. This marked an increase from the previous year, and significant enough that the increase can’t be accounted for by rising ticket prices alone. The fact is, people like to go to the show.

The megaplex has something to do with it. Charles R. Acland is professor of communications studies at Concordia University. In his book Screen Traffic , he describes how the introduction of the megaplex ? with its many screens, optimal viewing conditions and self-contained entertainment environment ? was designed in response to the temptation to stay at home.

“So exhibitors, as well as film producers and media companies,” Acland explains, “wanted to re-think ‘what was the special location?’ and one aspect of it was a kind of upscaling, making things a little more technologically standardized, a little more state of the art ? at least along their terms. And along with that, a little more expensive.”

* * *

Cut back to Saturday afternoon. In the lobby on the main floor of the AMC complex at Dundas and Yonge, four young women talk, still deciding what to see. They’re here as part of a birthday celebration, and their only plan was to hook up here. They’d settle on a movie once everyone arrived.

This was exactly what the megaplex was designed for. Since the mid-’90s, if theatres wanted to generate box office, they not only had to give people a good reason to get out of the house ? especially since home viewing systems were increasingly sophisticated and affordable ? you had to give them choice: the same principle as the supermarket, the big box store, the mall and the video rental store. If you could get people to go to a show the way they used to go to the show, the business of movie exhibition might stave off stay-at-home oblivion.

Judging by the people I speak with this Saturday afternoon, it’s worked. Take Naomi, 20; Sarah, 20; Anastasia, 20; and Victoria, 19: what they see is actually incidental to the event. The event is the going.

“It’s a social thing,” Victoria explains. “Today it’s a friend’s birthday, so we’re going to see a movie together. If you watch something at home you’re not going to gather around together the same way.”

Victoria’s friends also watch movies at home. Naomi prefers her laptop, and Sarah and Anastasia watch DVDs on TV. But nothing compares with meeting friends to see something together.

“I like comedies,” adds Anastasia. “Watching funny movies with a group makes it better. When you’re watching in the theatre and everybody laughs, it makes you laugh. It’s a whole better environment. Sitting at home and just watching it by yourself isn’t the same thing.”

The megaplexes, says Charles Acland, effectively “re-structured the landscape of theatres.”

“They really did change where you go and the kind of expectations that one has of a moviegoing trip,” he says. “Like deciding where you’re going before you decide what film you’re going to.”

Today, says Acland, “People make decisions about their proximity to a theatre rather than what they actually are going to see or even whether they’re going to see it.”

* * *

Bob Murphy, 55, and Adrian Shuman, 61, have been going to movies together for years. They too didn’t decide what to see until they got here.

“We got here and sort of spun a wheel and picked a movie,” says Bob.

“We’re both film buffs,” Adrian says. “We don’t want to give in to the small screen. We still love the experience of being surrounded by the image and the sound and other people and popcorn.”

Bob and Adrian also use the cinema as a hanging-out excuse. And for Acland, this may be the most compelling explanation for the persistence of moviegoing.

“It’s about the appetite for movies and the appetite for the sociality that accompanies them,” he says.

When people talk about a decline in “film culture,” he suggests, “they’re always assessing moviegoing in relationship to film culture. What I suggest is what would it mean if we understood it in relation to a history of going out?

“It’s not just about encountering the movie at the end. It’s about transportation. It’s about food consumption. It’s about seeing the landscape of your neighbourhood. And in a way that might be part of the continued longevity of what we simplistically refer to as moviegoing.”

* * *

But the show itself ain’t what it once was. Ask anybody who grew up pre-megaplex.

Like Atom Egoyan. He, like lot of older viewers, finds the customary distractions of contemporary moviegoing ? talking, texting, browsing theatres ? sufficiently aggravating to make stay-at-home viewing all the more attractive.

Egoyan began making movies in his early twenties. One of his dramatic fixations in early works like Next of Kin (1984), Family Viewing (1986) and Speaking Parts (1989) was the anesthetizing impact of home recording technology. It was likened to re-making reality artificially, with the result that people could no longer function in the so-called ‘real’ world.

“That’s not how it worked out,” he says today.

Egoyan is both amazed and mystified by the generation that has, in Toronto business strategy consultant Don Tapscott’s phrase, ‘grown up digital.’ His son is one of them.

They’re not alienated, and they’re very social, Egoyan says. And while they certainly watch movies, it’s not, according to him, with anything near the concentration, absorption or respect that audiences once did.

Or do they, but differently? As Egoyan points out, his son is every bit as interested in movies as his father was at the same age, and he’s certainly capable of absolute absorption. (“Although,” he adds, “his friends find The Godfather too slow and Pulp Fiction too challenging.”) He also notes how his own movies, like last year’s Chloe ? which has made more money than any of his previous films ? are more widely talked about now than they ever were. And he talks about how the increasingly participatory nature of digital media hearkens a decidedly different, maybe even brave, new world.

“Go back to McLuhan,” Egoyan says of the late Canadian media guru.

“We are experiencing the global village,” he says, “but in a way we never dreamt, because we’re participating in the construction of it as well.”

* * * * * *

“It’s an odd time,” says author Tapscott. “A time when kids in the schools know more about the biggest innovation in learning ever than their teacher, and the kids coming into the work force have at their fingertips better tools for innovation and high performance than our most sophisticated companies.”

Now that hard media matter ? paper, film, record, CDs, etc. ? has been rendered virtually obsolete there’s no turning back. Like it or not, the future is here. For Tapscott, this leaves no popular medium exempt from the need to radically adapt, not if it wishes to remain popular. And the megaplex will not stem the coming tide.

“The movie industry is next,” says Tapscott. “Sales are at an all time high, but overall attendance is actually down. You’ve got a few blockbusters ? like Avatar ? that are distorting things. But DVD sales are down.

“Ultimately, I think it’s going to be hard to protect movies just like it’s hard to protect a song. It probably makes sense to move towards a streaming video model, where you pay a fee for a month for access to all the new movies plus a library of a bunch of old ones.

“But the movie has a bunch of other things that are happening to it as well,” Tapscott adds. “I was invited to the Berlin film festival to give the Berlinale keynote in 2008, and I talked about this thing called ‘The Film 2.0.’ ”

“I asked, ‘What is the new narrative?’ the old one, the full-length feature film, has been around for a long time, at least as far back as Battleship Potemkin . But now, as the film becomes bits and becomes something that’s networked, you get to be in the movie. That’s where we’re going.”

* * * * * *

By becoming bits, movies are vulnerable to all manner of re-making. This is their future, whether or not the industry likes it.

Following the collaboratively interactive model of hugely popular websites like HitRECord, we can expect movies that we can edit to our own liking. And we can also expect movies made with creative interactivity in mind.

There will be increasingly sophisticated hybrids of movie and game experiences. Already, games such as Halo , Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty have created blockbusting interactive experiences that put the player in what amounts to a movie. Many movies have already been spawned by game sources while certain releases like The Matrix and Star Wars spawn gaming worlds of their own.

Movies will be made by more people than ever before; the recent buzz around digicam movies such as Paranormal Activity and Monsters suggests there is may at least be a future for releases that hitch low budgets to high concepts.

To compete with all this user-generated activity, theatrical releases will become even more singularly spectacular: 3D is one possible trajectory, but future blockbusters will boast all manner of you-have-to-be-here attractions to lure us out.

Technologies may come that let us experience movies as fully immersive spectacles, replete with smells, 360-degree perspective and multiple points of narrative possibility. IMAX-sized screens may well become the standard, and they will likely be filled by the kinds of movies that make size matter: fantasy, action, science fiction ? sensation.

So Saturday afternoon at the movies will stay put for the time being. Perhaps especially as other technologies skew toward solitary consumption experiences, we’ll continue to go to the show. Purely digital interactivity only goes so far.

Tapscott concurs, adding that, for all the interactivity we’ve come to expect, there will always be an appeal for the kind of story that does the telling for us: “Sometimes you just want to surrender to someone else’s narrative, just veg out and watch a movie.”

And, as director Bruce McDonald put it to me, “Sometimes people just need to get out of the f---king house, man.”

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