Horizon

A bracing read--I'm all in favour of bald cultural criticism.
The thing that strikes you the most is the evidence of how popular culture has reduced attention span, heightened people's ability to process inane information (the influence of computer games: hence the claim that flashed around the world a few weeks ago that watching tv and playing computer games 'made you cleverer') and machine worship. I think preferring Guns and Roses to the White Album is a sort of power/machine worship.
Now, when tv and music making technology has never been so advanced, the artistic merit of what is made has never been so low. Ducks from a volley of 'that's what they said at the time of 'Paganini/Jesus/Punch/Horace/The Crusades/Schnozzle Durante' comments.
The one cultural artefact that I didn't see those idiots dissing was the one that deserves a dressing down: Apocolypse Now...

Actually, Apocalypse Now is in there somewhere. Use your browser's find feature.

My 18 yo step-sister's boyfriend once complained that there had never been a scary black and white film, and that, in fact, it was impossible for a black and white film to be scary at all. (IIRC I had mentioned Repulsion, which for some strange reason he'd actually seen before.) I said, "Well, what about Psycho?" and he just laughed.

Then proceeded to watch one of the most insipid pieces of b-movie trash I have ever seen. It was incompetent and ineffective in every conceivable way, but apparently he considered it frightening. I couldn't believe my eyes; he preferred something like that to Psycho. Obviously the way he evaluated movies was so alien to me that it would be impossible to understand how he could believe this.

But the problem with drawing conclusions from Amazon user reviews is that to some extent we are just seeing what used to be far less visible, in the days before any nit wit could publish on the web. Most of these reviews are pretty sad, but I don't see any reason to suppose that this is abnormal.

There are also some interesting comments mixed in at the bottom where people criticize the whole idea of the game as elitist. Those are sort of fun too.