Media
While conventional reportage and essay writing often require the careful crafting of narrative flow, the building-block nature of the listicle lends itself to more rapid production. It can also be a means of "recycling" information, as often it is the context, not the content, that is original. For example, a listicle of "Letterman’s 9 Most Hilariously Awkward Moments" can be constructed by adding captions to YouTube clips. For these reasons the form has come under criticism as a “kind of cheap content-creation”:
It's so easy you wonder why everyone doesn't do it until you realize that now it's all they do: Come up with an idea ("Top 10 Worst ") on the L train ride to the office that morning, slap together 10 (or 25, or 100) cultural artifacts ripe for the kind of snarky working over that won't actually tax you at all as a writer/thinker.
The blogger/technologist Anil Dash has also disparaged the proliferation of listicles, particularly within the blogosphere:
Digg and delicious and the rest are littered with Top 10s and geek equivalents of Cosmo coverlines. It's not long until we get "21 Ubuntu Install Tips That Will Drive Him Crazy In Bed!"
Nevertheless, the form remains a mainstay of the newsstand and the web. The covers of magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Men’s Journal regularly sport at least one, if not several listicles (see image above). In 2009, postings in the format “25 Random Things About Me" became an internet phenomenon, starting on Facebook but spreading to the broader web, attracting considerable media coverage in the process. The website Gawker uses "Listicle" as a regular content category. Some websites, such as Listverse, are devoted almost entirely to the listicle format.
From the standpoint of generating online revenue, the appeal of the listicle format - where each item on the list is a separate page, loading a new set of ads - is obvious.
Read more about this topic: Listicle
Famous quotes containing the word media:
“The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognises neither pity nor pitilessness.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)