In recent years there has been a remarkable number of pratts given way too much airtime in which they publicly malign The Internet. The thrust of the argument they tend to use is that allowing anyone to publish anything means that you end up with a lot of shit; and no-one could deny that is clearly the case. However, when the amount of available information is so ludicrously and incomprehensibly massive, as it is on The Internet today, a comparatively tiny proportion is still unfeasibly huge.
A year or two ago Tim Rice was interviewed on the subject of the Internet and music. He argued, and I’m paraphrasing, that “in the good old days” a record couldn’t be released before someone else had heard it and actually liked it, but nowadays anyone can put anything out even if no-one else on the planet likes it.
Likewise, the TV companies still hang onto a similar lifeline by claiming that a show “doesn’t work” as the result of inaccurate ratings after only airing a couple of episodes.
Well I have two words for the TV people who believe their careful judgement protects us from hollow, talentless, crap: Horne and Corden. For Tim Rice and the rest of the music industry the two words are different but equally applicable: Kenny G.
Now here is a bit of math(s) for you; I call it the Cack Factor:
TOTAL AMOUNT OF SHIT MEDIA YOU WATCH
divided by
TOTAL AMOUNT OF MEDIA YOU WATCH
Firstly, lets take TV. Being generous, lets assume that the public would agree that for every hour broadcast, 50 minutes of it was unwatchable crap. I say this is generous because you need to take commercials and trailers into account.
The crap factor would be 50/60 = a cack factor of 0.83 or, as a percentage, 83%
Now lets compare it to YouTube. YouTube works differently; you don’t sit down and passively watch whatever YouTube wants you to watch. Instead you watch things that people send you, and then things that YouTube recommends based on that. Now lets consider the cack factor formula again. Being overly mean, we could argue that for every four YouTube videos you get emailed, three of them are shit. So, according to our formula, the cack factor is 3/4 or, as a percentage, 75%.
So even under these circumstances, YouTube beats TV hands down. But then consider that after watching the clips you’re sent, you may click on related videos. Again, conservatively, assume you watch one more video for every one you enjoyed. That makes the ratio 2/5 or, as a percentage, 40%. Much less cack! The reason ? You made a judgement decision on what to watch.
Nothing had to go through multiple, expensive, hopeless layers of management decisions. It was just published. If it’s genuinely shit, the few people that do watch it won’t recommend it…but then, as a wise women said, there’s a toilet for every arse. If Horne and Corden had been Internet only, we’d all have been spared; but people who favour childish, witless, piffle would still be able to enjoy it. There’s no competition.
