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I agree, the purpose of the piece was not a proof, but a narrative. The long tail of quality vs edited, curatorial content is an orthogonal argument to the one
by shalmanese 16y ago
I agree, the purpose of the piece was not a proof, but a narrative. The long tail of quality vs edited, curatorial content is an orthogonal argument to the one I'm making.
I guess I'm arguing that, given the same person, placed in two contexts, they will produce two different types of humor and the offline version will be objectively funnier than the online version. And the core of the difference between the two is due to the affordances of the space. Is that a bit clearer?
- jacobolus 16y agoOkay. But I would guess that the main reason that the offline one is “funnier” (insofar as that’s true at all) is that you’re more likely to know the guy making the joke. If you just walked up to a random guy on the subway and he started telling a joke, it wouldn’t be any funnier than if you found the same stranger’s e-joke. People clearly tell different jokes to different audiences, but I don’t think the distinctions in audience here are inherent in the medium. For example, someone telling a joke in an IRC channel with a bunch of regulars who know each other will tell a different kind of joke than someone writing a Youtube comment. Likewise a guy might tell his poker buddies a different joke than he’d scrawl on the inside of a bathroom stall.
- shalmanese 16y agoIt's funnier because the people who are joking know each other and are able to affect each other's lives in much more significant ways.