Chris Anderson at the Long Tail Blog quotes a passage from David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
Leo — “all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — Tolstoy would recognize Wallace’s point immediately.
I’m giving all of this special consideration as I enter the heart of “short head” vulgar and prurient America: Las Vegas.
More long tail talk? Look here at MaisonBisson or over at Wired Magazine.