I really like this little post on “Borges and the Sharknado Problem.” The gist:
We can apply the Borgesian insight [why write a book when a short story is equally good for getting your point across] to the problem of Sharknado. Why make a two-hour movie called Sharknado when all you need is the idea of a movie called Sharknado? And perhaps, a two-minute trailer? And given that such a movie is not needed to convey the full brilliance of Sharknado – and it is, indeed, brilliant – why spend two hours watching it when it is, wastefully, made?
On Twitter my friend
Ryan Catbird responded by pointing out that that’s what makes the
Modern Seinfeld Twitter account so magical: They give you the plot in 140 characters and you can easily imagine the episode (and that’s really all you need).
July 30, 2013 // This post is about: borges, culture, media, seinfeld, sharknado
In case you were on Twitter a few nights ago, there was a show on SyFy called Sharknado. It was, as you might expect, about sharks getting caught in a tornado. If you judged it’s popularity by Twitter alone you would have thought the whole world was watching. That, however, turns out not to be the case:
But Sharknado may have broken the mold; the movie blew up on Twitter last night, giving the impression that everyone with a TV was watching it. “Omg omg OMG #sharknado,” Mia Farrow tweeted last night, while Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza joked that he was writing an article about how Sharknado would affect the 2016 elections. But were all these people actually watching? According to the Los Angeles Times, Sharknado was watched by only 1 million people, which makes it a bust, even by Syfy standards. Most Syfy originals have an average viewership of 1.5 million people, with some getting twice that.
[Via Washington Post]
July 14, 2013 // This post is about: culture, ratings, sharknado, Syfy, tv, twitter
