essential poptimist reading

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

I was originally going to write quite a long bit about this book, but then I thought I might save that up and just ask YOU LOT if any of you have read it.

Not everything in it rings true, but the core observations (mass/pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding), and the fundamental inference (our brains WANT to be challenged) are things that everyone here will probably agree with. It's never a good thing to agree wholeheartedly with an argument/book, at least it feels wrong/uncomfortable to me, but my disagreements here are minor to trivial.

indeed the "mass/pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding" thing is so obviously true, but he actually goes into quantifiable specifics in a nice way. plus it's nice to have someone actually bloody well saying so forthrightly and in public, rather than the usual crap "going to hell in a lowest common denominator handbag"

he doesn't actually touch on music much at all (i'm going back to find that bit, cos there was something ironically slightly rockist about singles v albums he mentions) but it's still poptimism.

anyway. anyone?

Comments

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i think in the realm of telly at least, that the cognitive demand thing is clear (and the way it's spelled out in the book is interesting). as someone who watches quite a lot of old telly, it's v obvious that the pace of information exchange has ramped up considerably, and specifically the typical complexity of character relationships and layers of narrative threads has changed enormously. more so that this increased complexity is now EXPECTED of the model audience, and that if you could transmit some of today's popular dramas back in time 20 years the audience would be frightened and confused.

he does a good job of comparing apples with apples and lemons with lemons (as he puts it in the book), and the "story threads" comparisons Dragnet -> Starsky and Hutch -> Hill Street Blues -> Sopranos works very well. i also quite liked the "character relationship" net he draws of Dallas and 24.

actually he keeps returning to the *structure* of the sopranos, which is fine as far as his argument goes, because the "content" is irrelevant to his story, but irked me for precisely the wrong reasons - that i can't stand gangster stories.

of course the type of "good" that he's talking about is quite a narrow one.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

the sopranos is just soap though (says the person who's never watched an episode)

see also the pop video i suppose, even looking back at firestarter it seems so quaint and slow in comparison to hype williams style 2006 vids, but the consternation it caused at the time...