“The content farmer is the dystopian new journalist, producing online content, typically for a large company, in an attempt to garner more advertising revenue because of the popularity of the topic. Here, the value impartation is done by others (droves, really) via algorithms. Value is thus proportio…”— David Balzer, amazon.com
“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound.”— Friedrich Nietzsche, amazon.com
“The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it's quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that's fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”— Emerson Spartz, newyorker.com
“Goethe speaks for the artist, and his own position with regard to standards is quite clear: he represents the humanistic tradition which places responsibility for the fate of culture and individual morality in the hands of the intellectual elite. This elite betrays its mission when it plays up to th…”— Leo Löwenthal, amazon.com
“Relevance is discovered or produced by the reader; it is the moment and process of production in the cultural economy that takes the text beyond its role as commodity in the financial. Popular discrimination, then, does not operate between or within texts in terms of their quality, but rather in the…”— John Fiske, amazon.com
“The discernment involved would be very much like seeing the truth of complex mathematical formulae. Many may fail to perceive such truths, but once seen, such truths are unproblematic. That the many may fail to see such truths in those circumstances cannot count as evidence of the errancy of those t…”— James Gregor, amazon.com