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The good fortune of TikTok and Netflix shows that if you have enough eyes, mediocrity is perfectly acceptable.
By Shira Ovid
This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can register here for the week.
During a pandemic, it’s wonderful to have Amazon, Netflix and TikTok at your fingertips, and your clever fortune shows that what’s smart is very smart.
You might have heard this old saying: the content is king. The concept is that entertainment, data and exceptional and essential generation dominate the country. I’m not sure that’s ever been true, and that’s not the case now. The regulations are pretty “pretty good. “
Amazon may not have what you need to buy, but it will have five others that are the best substitutes. That’s why I recently attended several episodes of an old bad TV series. It’s pretty smart why Apple combines several non-essential elements. virtual one. Netflix, TikTok and YouTube are the engines of a pretty smart economy.
They have a small amount of smart stuff and a lot of perfectly fine products, and they package them in a convenient and useful way.
The strength of smart enough is underestimated, I think, because it turns out to be an insult. He admits that mediocrity is acceptable, but it is!
The smart economy, however, speaks of the balance of forces between those who create things and the custodians who distribute them.
The internet has made it less difficult for other people around the world to show the music they’ve created, the cat toys they make in their free time or the entertainment they have on an iPhone, but like anyone else can create anything, it’s hard for one thing to catch the eye.
That’s why corporations that can bring together a lot of other people in one position (Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, and others) have our kings. These are the Harry Potter qualifying hats that organize the sea of entertainment, data and products.
If you draw enough eyes in the same place, each and every single movie hit, online celebrity or featured video player is less important. If the TikTok video app didn’t have Charli D’Amelio, one of his most important impressions, some of his enthusiasts would panic, but most of them would be happy with everything that’s still there.
Did “Tiger King” get a lot of attention and attention on Netflix because it’s a television, or because Netflix has put it in the middle of its two hundred million subscribers? When one of the world’s most popular video game stars failed to thrive on the doorstep of an insanely popular video game website, it proved that corporations that pool an audience can overcome the appeal of a superlative star.
I don’t need to minimize the appeal of superstars and must-see programs. The National Football League can keep the American television industry alive, for example. Some Americans are kings of singular content.
But above all, for corporations that combine a large number of people and make it less difficult for all of us, the aggregate triumphs over the individual. Much smart enough is bigger than a little of the best, which is hard to locate. or charge more.
The funny thing about online life is that there are two poles. The fairly smart economy is facing the “passion economy,” recently written by Ben Smith, new York Times media columnist. Digital installations such as Patreon and Substack provide musicians, podcasters, drawing teachers or newsletter editors a chance to live by a small number of passionate fans.
Then the content settles. And the same goes for Internet sites that have a billion-dollar audience with pretty smart elements.
Companies are just looking to sell us what we want or want, they also want to sell us what they want.
On Tuesday, Apple talked about an astonishing array of products, adding new and improved versions of apple watch, iPad, and monthly subscription combinations for parts like Apple’s music service and new virtual fitness categories created through Apple.
Apple now has about 1,031 things on sale, you know, a lot of them have been added in years.
To understand why, you need to know that Apple is going through a midlife crisis.
The popularization of the smartphone is a gold mine for Apple. It still is. But the mine is running out of gold slowly. Around the world, smartphones adapt to essentials like refrigerators, and fewer people are eager to rush every year or two and buy another $1,000 iPhone.
Everything is fine. But that’s not very smart for Apple, this company claims it doesn’t care about cash, but yes, and corporations like Apple have to make more cash year after year, which is harder to do when the gold mine starts running out of gold.
So if Apple is suffering from selling more than it had been a small amount of valuable products, one solution is to make many more products, something for everyone.
This can help us understand why Apple has released a new iPhone style every year until 2018, and now has four. That’s why in recent years, Apple has also started making TV series, promoting news and video game subscriptions, providing credits. introducing an internal speaker and experimenting with the combination of your online subscriptions.
Many of these things can be just wonderful, or (ALWAYS, PUSH) pretty good. And we need corporations to present new ideas. But when you see those products, think Apple’s whispering too, “Please buy us more. “
Yoga teachers who oppose a conspiracy theory: some yoga instructors and others interested in wellness fear that QAnon’s conspiracy theory will gain ground in their community. My colleague Kevin Roose explained in a new feature called “Daily Distortions” that QAnon supports the language and sensitivity of a New Age healing workshop have helped expand the conspiracy that mistakenly claims that a clique of paedophiles and satanic cannibals is running the world and needs to undermine President Trump.
It’s easy to laugh, but Kim K is powerful: celebrities like Kim Kardashian West and Leonardo DiCaprio have said they’ll protest what they think Facebook opposes the wrong information and hate speech by not posting on Instagram or Facebook for 24 hours. “One organizer said celebrity freezing was a step in a broader lobthrough crusade opposed to Facebook,” my colleague Kellen Browning wrote. Others called it a useless performative gesture.
Maybe the singular stars are “pretty good”? My colleagues have a series of brief and thoughtful essays on how the Internet has fractured and remade what it means to be famous. Academics and geologists are famous. Nail artists and hedgehogs are stars. And you can vote for the maximum applicable celebrity (academics are leading the way right now).
All of us, this raccoon, deserve to hug a teddy bear (thanks to my colleague Liam Stack for locating this one. Yes, there’s literally a hug in today’s Hugs to This.
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