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I’m genuinely troubled by the implied suggestion that thoughtful people should avoid, or be put off by works they either disagree with or find uncomfortable, or
by simonh 4y ago
I’m genuinely troubled by the implied suggestion that thoughtful people should avoid, or be put off by works they either disagree with or find uncomfortable, or might dislike for any reason. Anything can be read and analysed by a thoughtful person.
I visited a relative in hospital recently and found myself listening to the audio of a super-trashy TV show a patient in the next bed was watching. It was fascinating. The acting was wooden and stilted as though being read out from the page, the dialogue was so direct and explicit it was painful “You know why I hate him so much, because he cheated me out of my inheritance!”. It was almost Mexican soap opera level. And yet it was captivating, because I found myself wondering about the business model that produces such material, who the audience is, what it’s like to be an actor on a drama like that. Even if something is terrible, there’s so much to analyse to discover why it’s terrible, and why some people might like it anyway.
- taylorius 4y agoThat was a bit of a switcheroo. Starting off exhorting us to not dismiss creative works just because they might seem lowbrow, and then revealing that the "entertainment value" you got from a soap opera was to try to imagine how anyone could profitably produce such rubbish! :-D
- simonh 4y agoI’m not in any way struggling to imagine it, and I’m not at all dismissing it, that’s not what I mean at all. There is no switch. Clearly people do produce content like that and it has a ready audience. I have no problem with that, it gave me a newfound appreciation for the dynamics that make such material successful and its economics.
- taylorius 4y agoThe switch I was trying to describe was from an appreciation of the content as a consumer of it - to appreciating its existence as an external observer of the process that created it. There is an implicit dismissal of the content itself in the second one, that I found funny. I was trying to be lighthearted, anyway... :-)