Time.

Film Oh Steven, wow:

"... I got my hands on a book by a guy named Douglas Rushkoff and I realized I’m suffering from something called Present Shock which is the name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: “When there’s no linear tie, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time”. That’s the hum I’m talking about. And I mention this because I think it’s having an effect on all of us. I think it’s having an effect on our culture, and I think it’s having an effect on movies. How they’re made, how they’re sold, how they perform."

That quote is mostly a quote because you should read the whole of Steven Soderbergh's keynote at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival which crystallizes in one place the general mood of cinema or at least Western cinema in the past couple of decades.

He's pessimistic.  I'm not.  There are ebbs and flows.  There is interesting work out there.  The problem is its obscured by the blockbusters more than ever or the release windows are so marginal we're all tending to simply wait for the dvd.  We're still watching this stuff, we're just not watching it in its intended setting.