I just had this urge to ask my fellow Reseters their opinion about a topic that is dear to me : media consumption and our capacity to aim for "better" instead of "more" or "fresh". It's not that I have anything against those others options but I think, and maybe I'm alone in this and that's all right, that we are increasingly assaulted with numerous ways of entertainment and that each ways in itself holds so many possibilities that a critical examination of said material is growing more needed by the year.
Now to add a little background to these lines, I have OCD and this impacts my life. Granted, the majority of other people maybe don't feel the same, but I dare think that the questions I'm asking are not worthless. To expand a little on this, my OCD has severely limited my media consumption as years passed, unable to choose between hundred of ways to entertain myself I finally choose the most obvious solution, fuck that noise. So I maybe watch two movies a year, still have to read so much books I should already have read, etc. But again, the quest for a better way of handling our consumption don't strike me as something only someone suffering from OCD should be interested in.
But there are two axes to this question :
- Patrimonial
I don't subscribe to the idea that pop culture is trash (although this debate has merits of its own), and I think keeping an eye on highly qualitative material from the past is a necessity.
That being said, how do you do it ? How do you select which material is worth consuming ? There are several issues at hand.
In the case of patrimonial material, critical references may be difficult to come by. I imagine scholars of pop culture are not dime a dozen. And the more niche the material the more difficult the endeavor will forcibly be. I'm not certain you can, for example, base your "old" anime watching on a random youtube channel.
I could see a top of all time kind of poll being made yearly. It leaves some issues like voters bias, though. You swap the scholar for the masses and hope that the cream of the crop emerges by itself, but I don't think that's automatically how it works. You obtain a popularity measure, not a qualitative one. Not perfect.
- Actual
I still think it must be possible to consume recent products without having the feeling to be led by fabricated hype. It's more of a personnal issue, totally granted.
But how do you choose what to consume ?
Reviews aggregator don't exist for everything, and traditionnal reviews and notation strike me as ill-suited in this search for the "best". I mean when you use maybe half the scale of notation, you don't help me much. If 80% of things are 7/10 I'm not really helped. When you don't put the work being reviewed against the notable other works available, I'm still left very much unhelped, with hundreds of things to parse through.
Possible solutions
The elephant in the room is that some part of the solution is in knowing oneself. But for one, shit is hard, brah. And secondly, if it can help in some capacity, you don't have magical eyesight and can't totally judge something you haven't consumed before, well, consuming it.
Disclaimer
This thread was made in good faith, it maybe could be seen as too personnal, too masturbatory or too broad, but again, looking to better consume strikes me as a noble endeavor, generally speaking.
It was illustrated humorously with divisive works, I don't really have any horse in each races here. Except for Ultimatum, the content of which makes my skin crawl.
Final thought ?
I think this subject is far too broad and my head hurts.
Now to add a little background to these lines, I have OCD and this impacts my life. Granted, the majority of other people maybe don't feel the same, but I dare think that the questions I'm asking are not worthless. To expand a little on this, my OCD has severely limited my media consumption as years passed, unable to choose between hundred of ways to entertain myself I finally choose the most obvious solution, fuck that noise. So I maybe watch two movies a year, still have to read so much books I should already have read, etc. But again, the quest for a better way of handling our consumption don't strike me as something only someone suffering from OCD should be interested in.
But there are two axes to this question :
- Patrimonial
I don't subscribe to the idea that pop culture is trash (although this debate has merits of its own), and I think keeping an eye on highly qualitative material from the past is a necessity.
That being said, how do you do it ? How do you select which material is worth consuming ? There are several issues at hand.
In the case of patrimonial material, critical references may be difficult to come by. I imagine scholars of pop culture are not dime a dozen. And the more niche the material the more difficult the endeavor will forcibly be. I'm not certain you can, for example, base your "old" anime watching on a random youtube channel.
I could see a top of all time kind of poll being made yearly. It leaves some issues like voters bias, though. You swap the scholar for the masses and hope that the cream of the crop emerges by itself, but I don't think that's automatically how it works. You obtain a popularity measure, not a qualitative one. Not perfect.
- Actual
I still think it must be possible to consume recent products without having the feeling to be led by fabricated hype. It's more of a personnal issue, totally granted.
But how do you choose what to consume ?
Reviews aggregator don't exist for everything, and traditionnal reviews and notation strike me as ill-suited in this search for the "best". I mean when you use maybe half the scale of notation, you don't help me much. If 80% of things are 7/10 I'm not really helped. When you don't put the work being reviewed against the notable other works available, I'm still left very much unhelped, with hundreds of things to parse through.
Possible solutions
The elephant in the room is that some part of the solution is in knowing oneself. But for one, shit is hard, brah. And secondly, if it can help in some capacity, you don't have magical eyesight and can't totally judge something you haven't consumed before, well, consuming it.
Disclaimer
This thread was made in good faith, it maybe could be seen as too personnal, too masturbatory or too broad, but again, looking to better consume strikes me as a noble endeavor, generally speaking.
It was illustrated humorously with divisive works, I don't really have any horse in each races here. Except for Ultimatum, the content of which makes my skin crawl.
Final thought ?
I think this subject is far too broad and my head hurts.
