Greetings from the other 99%?

A study published last week indicates and concludes that 1% of the World Wide Web is made up of pornography. Hmm...that actually sounds low, considering the junk mail spam I get daily, but maybe it is just a louder 1%.

I'm not shocked at that number. Walk into your local convenience store or newsstand. I dare say more than 1% of what is on the rack is classifiable as such ("sexually explicit or exploitative material with no redeeming social value"). At the local mom and pop convenience store, mom and pop must be pervs, because just about everything on their newsstand is named for some euphemism for some part of the female anatomy. Or is a car magazine.

I am always stunned by the array of magazines out there, the narrow band of a niche market some must fill. How many different golfing magazines can the market sustain? "Pro wrestling entertainment" magazines? Well, it all comes down to advertising revenues. If there are enough advertisers willing to buy ads, no matter how small the market is, the magazine continues.

The fact that more young Americans can identify Paris Hilton or Jessica Simpson than Martin Luther King Jr. or know the nickname for the latest celebrity coupling more than they know how their Senator voted on stem cell research says a lot about our culture. Ah well.

We live in an era of those who contribute nothing to culture or society make as much noise as possible to create the illusion of value. The internet has opened the media to the public, but there are days I wonder if the public is anything more than self-involved narcissists, just take a look at the proliferation of "critique" sites, where all you do is comment on the works of others, be it TV or films or other websites. A large portion of the critiques are just people trying to show how clever they are by accusing others of being unclever.

Yikes!

But, anyway...maybe we need a broader definition of pornography. Maybe "anything of no cultural value". But to whose culture? And what defines value? Are blogs then of no real value? Poetry is considered of no value by some (usually people who play video games all day, and of course, I consider the vast majority of video games of no value). I guess we can't easily come up with a definition of the value of something to culture.

My brain hurts, now.