Dear new columnists:
So you've recently been selected to write in The Chronicle next semester; good job. I thought I might take this opportunity to pass on some advice for attracting readers. Of course, you'll all fall into the broad category of "filler between Rob's columns," but my fraternity gets to count the time I spend writing this as community service hours, so here we are.
Before I get to the meat of my advice, I'll need to explain an important discovery I've made, something that will make your jobs a lot easier and quite possibly revolutionize the field of media studies as a whole. I call it the Media Masochism Principle.
I came by my discovery when I was charting my own time management and arrived at some startling results. It turns out that during my waking hours, I spend 6 percent of my time doing schoolwork, 11 percent keeping up on the news, 17 percent consuming entertainment with some artistic worth and a whopping 92 percent consuming entertainment that absolutely sucks. And that is the Media Masochism Principle: People love things that suck!
Look--say you're a random work of music. If you're a classical piece-and not that one by Mozart that goes dum, dum-dah, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dah--I've never heard of you. If you're a cutting-edge rock song, I'm completely out of the loop. But if you're the delightfully awful music video of Avril Levigne's "Sk8er Boi," I watched you nine times yesterday.
The same goes for movies. As far as I'm concerned, Fellini is some kind of pasta and the Truffaut is one of those weird sexual positions-did I mention I can't get to sleep at night without watching "Battlefield Earth"?
And, of course, the principle applies to media produced right here at Duke. As you know, Duke students are responsible for two comic strips, which happen to differ markedly in quality. Guess which one I always read first--Blazing Sea Nuggets? As if!
Trust me, our ability to understand and use the Media Masochism Principle will completely reshape our entertainment environment. After all, it's not just me: A scientific poll of my roommate reveals that 100 percent of Duke students also love things that suck.
Why? So far, I've deduced several possible reasons. The humor factor is obvious: unintentional comedy is always the best kind, which explains why our culture keeps Michael Jackson around. Tied in with humor is simple ego gratification-we feel more worthwhile when we revel in others' ineptitude. That's an especially operative principle for an aspiring writer such as myself.
But on a deeper level, I see in Media Masochism something akin to white guilt. There's only a finite amount of good entertainment in the world. Every time we look at a Rembrandt, we ensure that some poor child in Scandinavia has to endure abject crap.
Monopolizing the good stuff makes us feel cruel and inhumane, and so we retreat into "The Bachelor." In fact, the manner in which I suck up so much of the bad entertainment in the world makes me something of a Christ-figure.
So here's my advice to you, new columnists. How can you put the Media Masochism Principle to work for you and attract the most readers? It's simple: start sucking, immediately. And don't be pansies about it-you need to be embarrassingly bad.
If you choose to write about politics, don't commit to any ideology that wouldn't get you committed outside a university setting. Say crazy things like "Kindergarten should be abolished" and "Facts are patriarchal." If you get angry letters, use your next column to question publicly your audience's reading-comprehension skills. Don't be funny. Or better yet, try really hard to be funny and fail in the most teeth-grindingly miserable way imaginable. Suck long, and suck hard. Suck with a vengeance.
Hey-it worked for me!
Rob Goodman is a Trinity sophomore.
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