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entertainment as data inflation
Wednesday, June 19 2002The new Guided by Voices CD, Universal Truth and Cycles, is out, and (as Jami told me today via AIM), you can listen to the whole thing streaming from Matadorrecords.com. To read the reviews you would think it's the best thing since [insert the name of a wildly-influential album here]. It's a welcomed return to the old lofi formula of short song fragments interspersed among unexpected anthems, although (despite the hype) I wouldn't say it's as good as Alien Lanes.Tonight Gretchen and I watched another installment of American Idol, something we never would have done had we not invested so much in the show already. Actually, very little happened in tonight's half hour show. Somehow the producers managed to occupy that amount of time with the simple process of announcing the winners of a telephone poll. Ten would-be pop stars were winnowed down to three and we learned who they were. That was all. They managed to spice it up a little by showing a truly horrendous audition from back during the city-to-city talent search and then by showing the reactions of a particularly outspoken reject to some of the performances we'd seen last night, but everything else was cheap padding: idiotic banter between the would-be pop stars and the moronic hosts, supposedly suspenseful delays in the reading of the card with the crucial information, obscene amounts of advertisements, that sort of thing. Gretchen pointed out the obvious, "It's geared for people with much lower intelligence than us." For my part, I compared the slow delivery of information to the way the Web would work if we were all using 300 baud modems. This thought gave me a further epiphany: for all the high tech electronics underlying our digital cable installation, it still took a half hour for us to learn three names. Entertainment, at least entertainment of this kind, is the opposite of information compression. It's information inflation: taking three simple text-based facts that would fit within 100 bytes of storage and expanding it to fill several gigabytes.
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