[nessunodoro]

> "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." -- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

There's value to this sentiment, but I disagree. I'm the same age as the author of this post, and I remember when I was in high school, my parents were transfixed by the O.J. Simpson trial - the car chase, the analysis of Marcia Clark's outfits, the whole spectacle.

In college a few years later a media studies professor asked us for a show of hands as to who followed the Simpson trial. Groans, eye rolls, not many raised hands. He was blunt: ignoring media phenomena, especially repulsive ones, is a mistake, he said, if you want to understand how media affect our culture. Study them like a physician studies a virus.