Enjoy the Best, Not the Latest, Media

Enjoying the best of the past makes the best of the latest more enjoyable too.

Consumption of the best-ofs in a media category is an exercise in building media literacy. By listening to Pink Floyd you can get more out of Tame Impala.

Big media companies make more money from new than old, so are quite happy to have a consumer go through their life paying for potboiler ephemera. The consumer shouldn’t be happy with that though, as they’d have paid dearly in time and money for media that’s painfully beige compared to the best old stuff and also the best new stuff that they’d only have known to look for if they had built the media literacy.

I’m impressed that he’s saying some art has more quality than others

As someone who apparently frequents much more pretentious online film circles than OP, the idea that the highest rated films and shows on IMDB represent the "best" of the mediums is kinda silly.

The article uses Star Trek (2009) as its example of a mediocre film. Its IMDB rating is 7.9/10 from over 500k votes over 11 years -- surely this would place the film squarely in the "tried and tested" category.

If I look on some smaller sites I see a different story. Letterboxd: 7.2/10, 234k votes RateYourMusic: 6.4/10, 3k votes The first site has a higher ratio of capital f Film fans and the second site is a much smaller site focused on music. Using these three data points I can deduct that Star Trek (2009) is probably a decent franchise action movie that most will find enjoyable but won't stand up to scrutiny as a stand alone film or for those expecting something more substantial.

The article is right that it's so much easier to access the history of a medium than in the past. It's interesting to me when a previously unknown work from 25+ years ago is rediscovered and entered into "the canon". In alternative music a recent example is Long Season by Fishmans from 1996.

But going through the canonical "best of" lists for a medium is more-or-less a gateway to developing and discovering your own taste in these things (a process that never ends). You shouldn't put much trust in any single source.

Something that's missing now with this intermingling of old and new art is historical context. A film streaming platform is just a directory of video files attached to 250px images and paragraph blurbs. What is Netflix saying about film and its viewers when it has less than 50 films pre-1980? Now that watching 2000+ films before the age of 30 is common for film fans, what will that mean for the future of film?

Star ratings have been widely proven to be a total failure. Most people treat them as binary: either something is nice, and gets 5, or is crap, and gets 1. The neutral score for things that are OK tends to be 5, sometimes 4.

This is particularly pronounced whenever there are any consequences attached to the ratings. If you give anything but 5 to your Uber driver, you're risking them losing their job. If you give anything but 5 on an e-commerce platform, the seller may lose a lot of money. 5 being the "neutral" score became normalized.

There are far, far too many variables to complex performances like a movie, to make broad generalities about what you'll enjoy. A great movie may address themes uncomfortable for some to enjoy, at least where they are right now. Something great in the past may not age well. Average appeal can be a negative correlation for some who have different tastes.

I guess we can agree, that a badly made and acted move is likely to be unpalatable to most. But beyond that, its hard to gauge. That's why there's so much money in better predictors, they all suck so much now.