10:48 p.m. - 2003-09-01
but you can't get the sound from a story in a magazine
One of my long-running hypothetical subversive projects is to undermine the credibility assigned to low-budget popular magazines consumed by shallowness and consumerism. I have thus far thought of two ways of doing this, more to come in the future:
1) Take all the headlines off the cover of various magazines, and see if people can successfuly match a headline to a title. Ie, is "The Matrix Reloads, Hits the Bulls-Eye" from the cover of Entertainment Weekly, People, or Time? While this test only directly assesses the public's ability to match a magazine's presumed identity with its actual contents, by extension it could teach a valuable lesson to the participants themselves about the shocking homogeneity of our information sources: Regardless of whether your magazine is supposed to be a dispassionate, journalistic report of important news or a glitzy, star-obsessed insider look at Hollywood, you're still going to yammer on about how awesome the Matrix is.
2) This is a little more specific in nature. I'm always very irked whenever People does anything like "The Fifty Most Beautiful People In The World." I'm irked because usually at least 45 of the people are American superstars or one or two notches below American superstars. Does anyone besides me find this to be a suspiciously amazing coincidence? Like, the seventh most beautiful person in the world never turns out to be a Kansas milkmaid or some barber in Uzbekistan. The message? "Don't worry, folks! There aren't any pretty people you don't already know about! And, naturally, you and the people around you, no matter how beautiful you previously thought them, are by no means among the most beautiful in the world." Nevermind what a pointless thing it is to make a list of and put in a magazine to begin with: I want to see these things be honest about what they are. Or, better yet (and here's the subversive project, such as it is), let's actually create a list of the most beautiful people in the world, and have them all be people that have never been on television or in another one of these magazines. I think it could be interesting. People Magazine can take its assumptive omniscience regarding beauty and shove it.
I need to get back to my homework now.
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