A Quote by Steven Johnson

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.

Steven Johnson

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Assumption Because Big Common Companies Culture Decades Declining Denominator Dumb Follows Give Lowest Mass Mass Culture Masses Media Path Pleasures Simple Simple Pleasures Standards Steadily Toward Want Worked

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Steven Johnson
American - Author
Born: June 6, 1968

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

C. Wright Mills

The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.

Richard Linklater

I want everyone to recognize and know me. I don't want bodyguards. I want to be able to go out into the masses.

Shannon Briggs

I want to say to anyone who works in a drone workplace, raise the bar! There's no reason why you have to dress to the lowest common denominator.

Tim Gunn

When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.

Jack Ma

I think the record-buying public know what they like, and when people are trying to pander to them, I think they know it. They want the genuine article, so if we try to sort of "dumb down" for the mass public, I think they're too smart for that, and would recognize us as fakes. It seems like the bands that do crossover do so really on their own terms, and they just find that their terms just kind of make a big dove-tail with the masses.

Ira Kaplan

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

Jeanette Winterson

Scandal is like McDonald's. It's cheap and it's easily accessible to the masses, and when you're going to McDonald's, you know that you can get a salad, but do you want a salad? No. You want a Big Mac and French fries with an apple pie and a sundae.

Perez Hilton

It's always difficult when you want to do something really new, and you also want it to reach the masses, because the majority of people want to see what they've already seen before, or that they're already familiar with. To open the majority of peoples' minds to something new is difficult.

Jason Gann

I want the great masses of my people to take a greater pride in their appearance and to give their hair proper attention.

Madam C. J. Walker

The task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses toward certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses' field of vision.

Adolf Hitler

I want the great masses of my people to take a greater pride in their personal appearance and to give their hair proper attention.

Madam C. J. Walker

And last, we must bear in mind that the relationships between perception, thought, emotion, and behavior are neither automatic nor consistent. In many cases they are demonstrably affected or directed by culture and socialization. We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.

Hanne Blank

The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.

John Oliver

If you take a look at education, the kids that get good grades are said to humiliate those who don't. And what, then, do we do? Slow them down. We put obstacles in their way. We do not devise public education systems that are designed to deal with their superior learning ability. We retard it so that they don't learn any more, any faster than the lowest common denominator - and that really is the nub of it. The Democrats' equality and sameness is all going to be defined by the lowest common denominator.

Rush Limbaugh

...the Statue of Liberty's got this invitation: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your reeking homeless--' 'Huddled masses,' said Ira. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' ... Okay, fine. So like everybody in the old countries says, 'Hey, I'm a huddled mass,' and they all wanna come over.

Neal Shusterman

A Quote by Steven Johnson

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