Sturgeon's Law: An overabundance of Cr*p

In class today, we considered the highs and lows of popular culture on television. High quality "seems to pertain to my interests" and may include: good writing/production values, education, creative/new, good acting. Low Quality content was described as:  Sleazy, Rip-offs and Inauthentic.

Sturgeon's Law: that 90% of everything is crap was hotly contested. Is television 90% crap? Well, if you ask me, its true. But I have been watching television since 1961 or so and I've seen it all before. I think the percentage of bad fiction, television, films might be closer to 99%. It has all been written before. Many times. Formula television redux. Yippee-ki-yo-ki-yah.

The end result is that quality is subjective, a matter of opinion, determined by the person. I was reminded of something I learned years ago in a class about how the medium is the message: if a commercial or show doesn't appeal to you, it isn't being targeted to you. This works for any media. If you can't find anything to watch on the tube - it must mean you don't fit into the parameters of the writers and the producers.

Amateurs populating the long tail have generated a new kind of word-of-mouth tastemaking: Digg and Reddit, etal. allow users to vote on content that is of interest, generating a long tail of social network taste-making.

You can view the ignominy of the viral video of Rebecca Black, Friday, at the link. Just in case you don't remember which day follows Friday or comes after it.

As the class ended, we considered the oddity of the Blogger algorithm which causes the next link on this blog to direct to religion-related Blogger blogs. There is an entire thread of discussion about this phenomenon at this link.

For class today there was no brand new term although we all learned a word from the good old dictionary: Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification or the result of it.