Silicon-based Life May Be Impossible For One

The Economics Of Television Syndication And Dvd Sales Mean That There's A Tremendous Financial Pressure To Make Programs That Can Be Watched Multiple Times, Revealing New Nuances And Shadings On The Third Viewing. Meanwhile, The Web Has Created A Forum For Annotation And Commentary That Allows More Complicated Shows To Prosper, Thanks To The Fan Sites Where Each Episode Of Shows Like 'lost' Or 'alias' Is Dissected With An Intensity Usually Reserved For Talmud Scholars.

I Suspect Millions Of People From My Generation Probably Have Comparable Stories To Tell: If Not Of Sports Simulations Then Of Dungeons & Dragons, Or The Geopolitical Strategy Of Games Like Diplomacy, A Kind Of Chess Superimposed Onto Actual History.

Most Of The Time, Criticism That Takes Pop Culture Seriously Involves Performing Some Kind Of Symbolic Analysis, Decoding The Work To Demonstrate The Way It Represents Some Other Aspect Of Society.

Keeping A Slow Hunch Alive Poses Challenges On Multiple Scales. For Starters, You Have To Preserve The Hunch In Your Own Memory, In The Dense Network Of Your Neurons. Most Slow Hunches Pass In And Out Of Our Memory Too Quickly, Precisely Because They Possess A Certain Murkiness. You Get A Feeling That There's An Interesting Avenue To Explore, A Problem That Might Lead You To A Solution, But Then You Get Distracted By More Pressing Matters And The Hunch Disappears. So Part Of The Secret Of Hunch Cultivation Is Simple: Write Everything Down.

Every Childhood Has Its Talismans, The Sacred Objects That Look Innocuous Enough To The Outside World, But That Trigger An Onslaught Of Vivid Memories When The Grown Child Confronts Them.