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by VLM
2305 days ago
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For TV, a large number of people are paid enormous amounts of money and put huge efforts into the best result a bland corporate team can produce to increase ad sales by encouraging consumerism. "Love Island" does NOT exist to teach people about the human condition, its only goal is to increase hair spray sales, any other positive effect is simply a happy accident. Even "non profit" TV like PBS mostly exist to entertain the egos and virtue signalling of a small number of major monetary donors. On the other hand, books are usually written by one person so they have a much stronger and more focused voice, and that strong voice usually has an interesting axe to grind.
Or rephrased, if its not interesting or is overly bland, no one reads the book. Admittedly being the most successful at appealing to the groupthink of a sub-population willing to pay for a book is not a Utopian civilization level result, but it is still better than peddling consumerism, and most authors seem to want to get their story out more than they want wealth. Book authors much like pro athletes are a power law distribution where most starve but a microscopic minority get very famous and very rich, so if money were a primary goal they would have gone into finance or software development instead of writing books. One exists to addict you into consuming ever more bland megacorporate products, the other exists to sell the best ideas, either inherently best, or at least best at meeting existing groupthink demands. The voice of the product is like the difference between the billionth corporate marketed mcdonalds burger vs a (celebrity?) chef multi course meal. An excellent analogy would be watching TV would be like following the Walmart twitter account, whereas reading a book would be like reading Paul Graham's blog posts. |
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There was a time in the past when you could find true educational content.
Imagine randomly channel surfing and running into this.
https://youtu.be/feBT0Anpg4A
But I agree with your point. You can watch PBS mindlessly. I used to geek out on the obscure, ephemeral nature of all the educational films they used to show. It was a guilty pleasure.