Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Media is built to entertain
After half a year away from the timeline, the main takeaway was that the job of what appears on the screen is to entertain. How much of it someone wants is a question of how much entertainment they want, whether that is an hour a day or eight hours.
Rolex or Nike can convince you that their product is an investment rather than a liability, so you spend far more on it. Podcasts, posts, and essays can do the same thing, convincing you that what you are reading is useful and productive, and not the same as watching TV all day.
Little is lost by stepping away. Anything important gets filtered through the people around you. The most enlightened way to consume this media may be to skip reading it yourself and let others expose themselves to the radiation, then come back and tell you what mattered over dinner.
How did media come to be built for entertainment?
Media theorist Neil Postman argued in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death that television turned public discussion into entertainment. He said the form of a medium shapes the kind of ideas it carries well. Short, vivid, emotional material fits television and, later, feeds designed for engagement. His book contrasted this with the long printed arguments of the nineteenth century.
How do brands make spending feel like investing?
Economist Thorstein Veblen introduced the idea of conspicuous consumption in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Some goods, now called Veblen goods, sell more as their price goes up because the price itself signals status. Luxury brands cultivate this effect through scarcity, heritage, and resale value. Watches and sneakers both have active resale markets for limited models.
How do people get news secondhand?
Sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz described a two-step flow of communication in their 1955 book Personal Influence. They found that many people formed opinions from conversation with trusted people who paid close attention to the media, rather than directly from the media. These people were called opinion leaders. The study drew on interviews with women in Decatur, Illinois.
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