I’ve been at work for all of an hour and I’ve already seen five Internet things that make me kind of want to die (“13 Pictures of Writers in Funny Outfits,” “Babies in Car Seats Sing Hipster Song,” “Umpteenth Photographic Montage of Pretty Designers in Their Pretty House”) and to help me NOT want to die, here’s a little GWST, which gives me strength to brush aside my distaste for trivial information (trinfo.)
THE AESTHETIC OF THE HIT
The comfort was in agreement, the easy exercise of the modes of choice and preference. It was attractive and, as it was presented, not difficult. But, once interfered with, the processes of choice and preference began to take on an uncomfortable aspect. Choice in respect to important matters became more and more difficult; people found it troublesome to settle on a mode of work, for instance, or a partner. Choice in respect to trivial matters, on the other hand, assumed an importance that no one could have thought to predict. So what happened then was that important forces that had not been used, because they fell outside the new scale of national life (which was the life of television), began to find a home in the exercise of preference concerning trivial matters, so that attention, aspiration, even affection came to adhere to shimmers thrown up by the demography in trivial matters. The attraction of inappropriate attention, aspiration, and affection to a shimmer spins out, in its operation, a little mist of energy which is rather like love, but trivial, rather like a sense of home, but apt to disappear. In this mist exists the Aesthetic of the Hit.
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