James Wolcott, the media and culture "expert" who, rather than be hired away by a university looking for somebody to produce immutable soundbites about things like media and culture, scribbles a column for Vanity Fair, takes on the "next wave" of Hollywood (see: Gossip Girl) in this way:

"As for the class of 2008 pictured in these pages, they inhabit a far more predatory media-parasite environment, a Grand Theft Auto of “gotcha,” which so far they’re handling with aplomb. Easy to track, hard to trap, they belong to the iGeneration, for whom texting and Twittering are as natural as popping orange Tic Tacs, inhabiting and trailing invisible clouds of information wherever they go in the digital eco-system, where online and off-line, real life and Second Life, overlap. Boundaries dissolve everywhere they turn their pretty heads. It’s a short, sharp hop from the wholesome happy perk of Disney’s Hannah Montana, whose Miley Cyrus can’t show a little bare shoulder without the world flipping its bonnet, to the spite-laced hangovers of the CW’s Gossip Girl, where decadence is in full Baudelairean flower. There, every Coach bag contains wanton secrets. Treachery and bitchery gleam from every compact mirror. Youth and beauty have their privileges, among them being the ability and agility to roll out into the hazy dawn following the squalors of the night before and still possess the throwaway glamour of a Bryan Ferry song. A fan craze and a critical fetish, Gossip Girl has hit the sweet spot of the Zeitgeist, the X mark where sex appeal and pop sociology intersect and the story lines hold an illusion of seamlessness, as if they sprang full-blown from the brow of Entertainment Weekly."