This article has nobody particular in mind. I am just sharing my thoughts.
If you hover over your reputation score you will see the following message:
“The reputation score is based on the history of votes received by the account and is used to hide low quality of content.”
Pulp fiction vs “Pulp Fiction”
Have you ever seen a movie that kept you on the edge of your seat while you were watching, but once you found out what happen and walked out of the theater you forgot all about it? The same could be said about a book that you can’t put off unless you know what happened in the end. As a result, you run down the pages like you would through an elevator.
This genre either in movies or literature is called pulp fiction.
Pulp Fiction is a genre of popular literature where the narrative of the book is void of the artistic and cultural values. It is written and published accounted for the simplest taste of a general reader. Usually, it contains enticing intrigue, full of interesting effects, melodrama, descriptions of crimes and love affairs. Visit a local thrift store and you can find boxes of those books.
The namesake Tarantino’s movie, on the other hand, was nothing like that and it was an interesting paradox. I remember feeling perplexed seeing it the first time in 1994. Huh? What the hell? Wait a second let me see that again. It took me a couple of views to put it in perspective and to absorb the cultural and artistic richness of this movie. It’s non-linear (not chronological) approach is, although confusing at first, is a great strength of the film. It allows to blend together seemingly disparate elements and thus offers a unique perspective for character analysis.
For example, the rape scene Marsellus Wallace is overwhelmed, humiliated and devastated. Then in the very next scene, that chronologically happens before the rape scene, we observe Marsellus in the apogee of his criminal power.
This illustrates how vulnerable a human life of every person can be even if they are at the top of their success and a pinnacle of their power. Unlike “Pulp Fiction” which enjoyed a great marketing success, many movies that packed a great cultural and artistic value might not score high at the box office. For example “Shawshank redemption” didn’t make a big splash in the theaters like for example “Transformers” or “Teenage Ninja Turtles” did. However, “Shawshank redemption” you can watch over and over while the other two movies are hard to watch more than once.
When a writer can kill for money
One of the most curious characters in Three Musketeers is Grimaud - the silent servant of Athos. The same Grimaud whom Athos divided into 10 stakes in a dice game, which allowed him to win back the diamond ring that the French Queen gifted to D’Artagnan and the horses’ saddles received from the duke of Buckingham. In the last book of the trilogy, Dumas kills Grimaud, giving it a simple mercantile explanation. The editor started paying him per word. The entire reason why Dumas introduced Grimaud in the first place was because he used to be paid per line. Thus, the characters with the shortest responses produced as much money as those with the long ones, while the writer had to exert much less work.
Interestingly that because of financial considerations Dumas inadvertently invented the style that a century later was implemented as TV serial. That is … to write a small chapter every week and stop on the most interesting spot to keep the audience impatient to find out what will happen next – the Scheherazade-style.
There would be one Swiss less
If my memory serves me right in one of the episodes of “Twenty Years Later,” the “Three Musketeers sequel,” Porthos fights and kills a Swiss opponents. When asked about this encounter he says something like this “No big deal. There would be one Swiss less.” A reader that usually runs through the lines reading Dumas books will perceive this as a cute joke, chuckles and reads on. A quite different consideration is given to a death of an adversary in one of my favorite novels “The Chronicles of Charles IX” by Prosper Mérimée. See for yourself…
I don’t know French and had to translate from a translation. Nevertheless, I think it is apparent even with my coarse translation that the scene is very believable as if you were the actual observer. Technically speaking the difference between Dumas vs. Mérimée description is the time allocated to the scene and the camera angles.
In Dumas' case, the scene is shot from relatively afar, if it is played in a theater. When the Porthos’ opponent falls, the camera gives a close-up to nonchalant Porthos’ face and emphasizes his witty phrase. This allows a reader to perceive his adversary as merely an obstacle on the way movie action sequence, without perceiving this death as actual death. In Mérimée’s case, the fight sequence is filmed at close up with the camera moving around the fighters showing the real anatomy of the fight. The viewer is forced to deal with the death of a real person. A psychological impact of this scene on the reader’s psyche is much heavier.
Quality and popularity don’t always go hand in hand
That is basically the main difference between a popular “pulp fiction” book and a book that packs some artistic or cultural value. Compare for instance “Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown and “Faust” by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. The first one you can read within a couple of days. The second will take you a week and you might need to read it several times. It’s heavy in style and in a philosophical content. In fact, not every person can stomach reading this book. I dare to say, it won’t be very popular. Yet can we say that “Faust” with its immortal philosophical dilemma and vivid characters is a lower quality book than “Da Vinci Code”? The later one is written so poorly that, at times, you can switch character’s lines and a reader wouldn’t even notice it.
Switching gears to Steemit
Steemit praises a popular content and deems unpopular posts as “low-quality content.” I think this is incorrect in principle and terminologically. I don’t want to point to specific entries, but I’ve seen a number of highly professionally written entries that get very little votes if any and many poorly written and poorly thought out posts that got disproportionally large audience and praise.
I don’t know if anything could be done about it programmatically. AI bot technology isn’t developed enough to evaluate writing skills, composition and artistic and cultural impact of a piece of writing. So far it can only count.
Still, I feel uneasy every time I see a great piece of writing, where an author obviously put much thought, energy and talent deemed as “low-quality content” while some obvious hacks or brain farts perceived by the system as “high quality.”