Monday, March 15, 2010

Niche Market for The Bean-Obsessed?

We as a culture have become obsessed with minutiae. I blame the seemingly endless stream of information floating into every orifice via a myriad of technologies. There are countless websites on every topic we could ever want to, or wish we couldn't, imagine. Sites like Twitter and Facebook allow us to record for posterity every insignificant detail of our lives - "I just took a piss, and it was slightly green. Maybe I'm eating too much broccoli."


There are now over 500 channels on our TVs (remember when there were only 7? Yeah, you know you do). This means that network execs have to come up with a vast number of programming topics to fit into a rapidly multiplying amount of "niche markets," which essentially means a target audience for topics that are more and more narrow, to the point where any specific subject may interest maybe three people, and bore the crap out of the rest of us. 

Yesterday while recovering from the rooster flu or whatever the hell other barnyard animal from which it was originally derived, I was channel-surfing and came across a documentary about beans. This was not even about the health benefits, which would have been somewhat interesting though not particularly new, but rather the history of bean growth in America. I think it was on the History Channel. I guess they ran out of material about World War I and decided to go with veggie folklore.

Of course, this couldn't compare in sheer entertainment value to what was showing on the National Geographic Channel - "Sizing Up Sperm." This apparently involved the simulation of conception with mountain-climbers clad in white, doggedly scaling up a series of precipices, determined to reach their destination even if it meant that either they, or all of their comrades, would be wiped out along the way.

Not that I'm uninterested in sperm, per se. But some topics are better as concrete experience.

1 comment:

  1. There are several jokes there that I won't touch (that doesn't sound good either).

    http://laughinginpurgatory.blogspot.com/

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