Rural purge
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
This kind of correlation has always seemed specious to me. It's the streetlight effect—it's hard to quantify why a show is popular we'll just assume it's because of the genre, since that's easy to identify.
I remember when Desperate Housewives took off in 2004, and studio execs assumed that viewers suddenly wanted prime time soaps. And they released a bunch more prime time soaps that were lousy and flopped.
I think viewers want quality content, regardless of genre. Genre is just a heuristic device.
Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article. Continually declining popularity seems like it could easily also be said to warrant cancellation.
Wikipedia has changed a lot in the last decade.
I don't know that this article has a long life ahead of it.
This was an era where pregnancy was a forbidden topic (among so much more) and where parents were shown sleeping in separate beds. It's not surprising that people eventually grew to hate this fantasy world.
This was mostly because of my contact / travels with younger folks outside the US who I would talk to. I was supersized by how may other younger people seemed to have their view of America heavily influenced by imported TV shows / movies. A surprising number seemed to assume that everyone was a TV 'type', school life was like a TV show, and the assumption that most everyone was wealthy like the shows at the time.
This was well before the age of the internet.
As far as the actual media trends, I think it usually just follows fads and trends. I don't think there's a real 'motivation' behind it outside getting eyeballs on TV.
To be fair, Americans also believe this.
I don't really have any European stereotypes other than broad generalizations like Belgian people like chocolate and Germans like beer.
I have no idea how many guns an average American sees when walking around (excluding cops and soldiers), but I'd think at least 1 a year. In all euro countrys I've been to, my answer is 0.
I always feel that way with the jobs that TV and movie characters are assigned. Entertainment jobs are vastly over-represented (as so much of art is somewhat autobiographical). Straightforward, well understood jobs like doctors, cops and teachers are pretty well represented. Then those jobs that often require further explanation whenever a stranger hears that job title are much less represented - how many actuaries or data analysts or logistics managers do you see in film? Approximately none, but I think more of them exist in the real world than all of the screenwriters you see on TV.
> "Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to Write What You Know, which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery."
Could the rural purge have been the result of network executives alienated and at odds with the viewership they were nominally at the behest of?
Urbanization did not increase significantly at this time, so it seems cultural factors are the better explanation.
My guess is that somebody does a successful show and everyone else jumps in the pool.
To refresh my memory, I just looked at a bunch of years of network programming. The 'rural' comedies don't seem to make that much of a footprint. If anything, a person could probably build a more convincing, invented-from-whole-cloth, essay about the birth and death of Western TV shows.
I think I probably agree with you though that Westerns (both on TV and film) are probably the almost stereotypically American genre that used to be hugely popular and is largely non-existent today.
But I'm not sure I'd assign any great significance to the fact other than shifting tastes and, perhaps, sensitivities.
(Changed pretend to purport)
Now, cultural fluency questions have appeared on IQ tests, especially in the past. However that's not so much an attack on the idea of "g" as it is a problem with antiquated methods of measuring it.
That's not to say that IQ tests are that accurate. The biggest confounder I know of is ADHD, which causes the tests to come out five whole points lower on average. I'm sure there are others.
There are a lot of cultural factors involved in believing a seemingly pointless exercise like matching squares is worth doing. You have to believe that something good can come out of it in general; and you have to believe that something good can come out of it specifically for yourself.
More seriously, random pattern matching questions are the best you can do to control for the not-caring factor, because they eliminate the advantage of test prep. The SAT has a significant test prep factor, which I agree is highly confounded by "culture" (a byword for how much your parents make you study) and the circumstances and opportunities related to test prep, including the motivation of the student, and the availability of a place to study and study materials. IQ tests are significantly more meritocratic than algorithms interviews or the SAT.
OT, but I really love GlaDOS and hope there's another Portal soon.
I'm not sure if we want to do that because the capacity for working hard is often more valuable than "g". One's capacity and willingness to work hard for a long time is impossible to untangle from one's circumstances including one's upbringing. Fairly testing for that is much harder than testing for g but it may be too crucial to ignore.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24055883/
So what exactly an IQ test is measuring differs between cultures (though it certainly is measuring -something- since there are other correlations), since even the separately identifiable and measurable abilities that lead to someone doing well on an IQ test differ across cultures.
Source for the story, please?
> But they had carried their luxury to such a pitch that they had taught even their horses to dance at their feasts to the music of the flute. Accordingly the people of Crotona, knowing this, and being at war with them, as Aristotle relates in his History of the Constitution of Sybaris, played before their horses the air to which they were accustomed to dance; for the people of Crotona also had fluteplayers in military uniform. And as soon as the horses heard them playing on the flute, they not only began to dance, but ran over to the army of the Crotonians, carrying their riders with them.
-- Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
The Aristotlean source he cites is lost.
Which magazine / when? It sounds like this might actually contain some insight into the thinking of the magazine's editors, which could be interesting (so long as one is careful to assign no truth value to the content).
Edit: Googling has led me to a few, all citing this one paper from 2006. Political Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Aug., 2006), pp. 511-526 TLDR: The methodology is a bit loose, taking biographical achievements in earlier life and correlating them with people of known intelligence who did similar things. This leads to the perhaps-unsurprising result that they were all estimated at above-average IQ. I'm not sure why a 2006 paper would be turned into article fodder now.
-Thief 3, some Hammerite (paraphrased)
IQ is a meme, and once you get away from the ivory tower and see how everyone else has to make it, you realize just how jacked the entire thing is. The thing in this case being the prestige class. Noblis oblige is dead, the new money is stark raving mad, the old money couldn't give a shit more. Nobody has any more of a clue than anyone else, and the executable bad idea is valued over and above the good idea that just doesn't seem quite ready to crystallize yet.
The biggest curse in my opinion is to see and grok the magnitude and nature of the problems but to not be in a position to do much about them besides trying to explain it to a handful of people and hope a couple understand, are in a spot and mindset to do something about it, take it, and run with it. It's kind of like being a Chief or high level enlisted in the armed forces from what I gather. Too busy getting things done to keep the status quo moving, but also facilitating bottom up information propagation and nudging the command structure in the right direction via reality checks.
Oh... The dreams that have died from learning how the world really works. They are a plenty.
To my understanding, IQ tests do measure generalized intelligence, and a lot of standardized tests correlate to them fairly well.
However, elite universities have been deemphasizing standardized tests for decades in favor of fuzzier admissions criteria. This, among other things, enables discrimination against minorities that overperform on standardized tests (historically Jews, currently Asians).
You’re right that the elite class is a self-selected cultural elite, but standardized tests are less of a tool and more of an impediment to their self-selection process.
Having gone to an elite school for undergrad, I'd argue most students were around 2sigma or slightly below, but almost universally also had 2sigma levels of work ethic, self-discipline, and goal-seeking.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
So the average US high school has about 0.5 kids who get admitted to Harvard, about one every 8 years. So if Harvard is admitting exactly the smartest US kids (plus a smaller number of even smarter international students), all of them are probably smarter than any of the smart kids at your high school.
But they probably aren't. I didn't apply to Harvard, myself. If I had, I probably wouldn't have gotten in.
Or perhaps believed instead of realized, but that conclusion was not necessarily borne out in the data.
Fox News' later success (absolutely dominating cable news both in the demo and out, more or less since its inception) seems to demonstrate that the demise of all of these shows at the same time left a vacuum for a certain type of programming that probably still persists to this day.
For example, take major brands like Pepsi, Coca Cola, GM, and Ford that have tons of money to throw at everyone and a niche company like Lear Capital that sells gold and silver. Some content draws enough big advertisers to fill up 100% of the ad slots while running up the price but if Pepsi/Coca-Cola/GM do not think running ads during "Little House on the Prairie" is worth the marginal benefit, that leaves Ford and Lear Capital to make the show profitable. Before Fox cornered their market, Lear Capital might not reach enough eyeballs in their target demographic to be able to buy enough ads on "Little House on the Praire" to make the show profitable because its in the same time slot as "Antiques Roadshow". Obviously Ford won't pick up the rest of the tab for one show so the major networks end up dropping the older audiences' shows one by one when there isn't enough advertiser demand. All the while, bidding up the cost of ads on popular shows depletes the big brands' ad budgets even further.
Then, Fox comes along, and since most of the big brands need to push brand awareness their TV ad budgets grow (it's a new major network!). They buy their usual ads and all of those niche players who wanted to advertise to that demographic on TV but couldn't because it was spread too thin can come together on a major network that caters just to their needs.
You'd have to get TV writers that want to understand rural communities first, instead of painting dumb-shit broad strokes from fuzzy memories of watching Green Acres as a kid. Mostly, though, they just do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9_N4k5IQI
Parks & Recreation, Schitt's Creek, Breaking Bad, Ozark, Sons of Anarchy, Dallas, and that's without even looking at the Discovery Channel.
IMO we need to talk to each other more if we want to understand each other better, though. Not through dehumanizing screens, but in person and in good faith. When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with a stranger in a train, airport, store etc?
Perhaps has another commenter noted, the writers would first have to understand that dynamic, and to do so would be a major shift at the moment.
Idealized by city folk, maybe. As one who grew up in a rural area, when I watched the shows it was more "let's make fun of the simple country folk and their strange ways". There was no idealization, most of it were television shows that looked to be written by city people that have never been past their city's beltway, who imagine what country life might be like. Poster children include Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies.
I do miss Hee Haw, though. R. I. P., Messrs. Owen and Clark.
The popularity of all of the "Jane Goodall studying the gorillas" redneck porn on Discovery and National Geographic and History Channel, along with more prestigious dramas like Yellowstone or Justified or Longmire would indicate to me that this is still a very profitable demographic to target, albeit distasteful to the major television executives.
Justified should be talked about like the Soprano's/Breaking Bad or The Wire - it really was that brilliantly done.
Agree that Justified is a very well done show.
I have also been enjoying Wynonna Earp, which is kind of like Justified meets Ash vs Evil Dead.
Also, Longmire's cabin is located in Valles Caldera National Preserve[0]. It's a little outside of Los Alamos, and it's an amazing place to visit especially if you enjoy hiking. And don't forget the Bradbury Science Museum[1].
0. https://www.nps.gov/vall/index.htm 1. https://www.lanl.gov/museum/
Is there a reason to think this is the case?
I find YouTube to be the land of copycats and homogenization just as much as anywhere else. If anything the desire to attract clicks, views, thumbs seems more immediate than TV.
* funny Mario Maker levels
* pop history comedy videos
* teardowns of random historical firearms
* cooking from reconstructed historical recipes
So it's hard for me to look at this and see homogenization.
It seems like any group of similar videos are heavily influenced by each other and often copy each other if they see another creator got a lot of response from their video.
Are reaction videos getting views? Blamo, everyone does some reaction videos, and so on.
As such, obviously, they talk with one-another a lot; and usually trust one-another enough to make each-other moderators/admins in their Twitch/Discord/etc. (I mean, often they attend one-anothers’ weddings. There’s a lot of trust there!) And so there’s a lot of “hey, this did work for me, and made me a lot of money! You should try it too!” advice going back and forth.
With the television networks / movie studios, the aping is the recipient’s idea. But with independent creators, it’s usually an external, unsolicited suggestion from another creator. The recipient of unsolicited advice will usually put a lot more thought into whether it really applies well to their situation, than they would if they came up with it themselves. (Unless they’re a channel whose whole “thing” is just copying what’s popular. But that doesn’t happen much in these niches, as you can’t really content-farm a niche.)
Mind you, within the “everyone in the niche is friends” paradigm, you do sometimes see newer creators seemingly aping others a lot — but what’s frequently happening there is that the creator has some experienced creators as patrons/producers for their videos, where the experienced creators have the goal of “bootstrapping” the channel quickly into success, and so are guiding the new creator into these cliche-but-popular video formats (and the new creator is going with it, because 1. they’re inexperienced and don’t know better; and 2. their channel doesn’t yet have a brand to tarnish — that’s something they can build after they have followers.)
I see one person within a category try something, odds are the other 5 people I follow will do it. And these aren't new folks, they're the established leaders in views and etc.
I guess there's an advantage of iteration ... sort of there, but man it feels like homogenization none the less.
... but the sum of all YouTube viewers still have a finite amount of time per day to consume the content, so the game flips from "elevator-pitching some executive your idea is worth risking a highly-valuable timeslot" to "pulling in hundreds of thousands of individual audience members to like, comment, and subscribe."
Much like there are multiple ways to convince an exec, there are multiple ways to attract an audience. While they can look like the same game if one turns one's head and squints, they're mechanically very different.
(... possibly worth noting: YouTube does have premium original programming, which is slightly closer to the old "elevator-pitch your idea" model. But that's more to build exclusive property for its premium offering than to fill timeslots, and one doesn't have to partner with YouTube to reach a broad audience).
In other news, smoking cigarettes is good for your health, says this old study I have here. Please just ignore where the data is from and who funded it, it's totally trustworthy!