Holden was hyperbolic, for the reasons you suggest. But his point about the pernicious effects of a show that suggests popularity=quality is a good one. I was serious when I said that the show is pedagogically useful: as the title of the blogentry suggests, the show is a non-theatening, ideologically neutral exercise in seeing one of the problems of democracy -- that just becuase more people voted for Scott than Nadia, doesn't mean Scott is better than Nadia. But it also allows greater contemplation of the meaning of democracy: is it (a) that we trust the people to make the right judgements, or (b) that whatever the mass voice says IS (definitionally) the right judgement? Plato is skeptical of either interpetation, of course. But the show gives us some good ways to consider the distinction. For instance, consider interpretation (a) above. While it's objectively wrong to rank Scott higher than Nadia, it's likely that Nadia would not make the final 3 anyway, and as long as Scott doesn't either, than this week's results don't even matter, and a proponent of interpretation (a) would say "I trust that, by the end of May, the people will have acted wisely." I don't know, we'll see....
by Aeon J. Skoble on April 15, 2005 at 9:10 AM