When You Don't Have To Ask For

Silicon-based Life May Be Impossible For One Other Reason: Silicon Bonds Readily Dissolve In Water.

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.

We Are Strangely Biased, As Individuals And Media Institutions, To Focus On Big Sudden Changes, Whether Good Or Bad - Amazing Breakthroughs, Such As A New Gadget That Gets Released, Or Catastrophic Failures, Like A Plane Crash.

Most New Movements Start This Way: Hundreds Or Thousands Of Individuals And Groups, Working In Different Fields And Different Locations, Start Thinking About Change Using A Common Language, Without Necessarily Recognizing Those Shared Values. You Just Start Following Your Own Vector, Propelled Along By People In Your Immediate Vicinity. And Then One Day, You Look Up And Realize That All Those Individual Trajectories Have Turned Into A Wave.

Popular Culture, On Average, Has Been Growing More Cognitively Challenging Over The Past Thirty Years, Not Less. Despite Everything You Hear About Declining Standards And Dumbing-down, You Have To Do More Intellectual Work To Make Sense Of Today's Television Or Games - Much Less The Internet - Than You Did A Few Decades Ago.