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Mediocrity is king
- chipsy 16y agoI think "mediocrity" is too negative. It demonizes the nature of the content, without reflecting on audience tastes. I read Tyler Cowen's "Create Your Own Economy" recently and it drove this message home: in a world where there is plentiful, immediate access to information, people want to graze and construct their own meanings and experiences from it - make it into building blocks. This demand is what is pushing us towards a vast accumulation of bite-sized delicacies - 2-minute video clips, 5-minute video games, <500 word blog posts, etc. A lot of classical inefficiencies are cleared out of the way by this - if it's all merit-driven, the work has to be as good as possible for as many people as possible - which means small budgets, a minimum of franchising and lock-in, a minimum of editorializing. It's gotta be tiny and focused, so that it can be reused. Sort of like Unix. There's plenty of room for quality, but it has to stand alone, be very accessible, and not get buried inside a sprawling monolithic work. This doesn't mean that the long form is dead, just that it's more likely to exist in the future as a patchwork composite of generics. That is our natural tendency; it facilitates language to do so.