Clickbait title: Tertiary source complains.

One of the things which lingers in the background of every social media diet is that the main topics of social media tend to be things not happening on social media. You may talk about your graduation on it, but the graduation is not happening on social media (I hope), it’s happening in real life. You are probably also not going to watch a full movie on social media (unless it was artsy or old enough to be on there). But what you can watch easily are reviews, discussions and commentary.

This is not an argument of copyright, where we might have to argue about how much a review is a substitute of the original work, but they sure are things you can do instead of watching the movie. I indeed think that watching a review is in many ways inferior than experiencing the art for yourself, and this is what worries me.

So there is of course a wide spectrum of secondary sources. You have very academically adept reviews or stupid “top 101 facts about show you love”. There will be huge variety in the quality of this content, but in some way I regard all of these as “pre-digested”. For one they will probably be shorter than the original (with notable exceptions) and as such they necessarily will need to focus on some parts whilst cutting others out. This basically already violates the original vision of the work.

I am not the biggest fan of authors being authorities about the meaning of their work, but what I do think is important is to experience a piece of media in some sort of “original form”. This is less because the original form is holy and more because basically every process of breaking it down is biased and tends to be focused on making the content more palatable. You may start with removing the “boring parts” or the “ugly parts” and I think this deprives us of a lot of emotions that the original could evoke.

Editorialising is of course an art, and some reviews can become artistically meaningful in and of themselves. But being honest here about the types of media critic content I watch, they tend to air much more on the side of making the original work more comfortable and “understandable”, effectively sanding off the edges. Not to speak of blatant misrepresentation and propagandising.

And what then happens when I form an opinion of something? Well it’s certainly not a primary source, that’s the art itself. And the secondary source are reviewers… oh god I’m a tertiary source. Academically basically useless, and I think sometimes for good reasons. As content like this passes through my brain, I will of course make my own interpretations, but the ideas have passed through so many brains, they have separated from the original meaning of work so much, they might not even apply anymore.

This basically means I know of a lot of things happening in the media world, and I will invariably have opinions on them, but my opinions on specifics of a work are basically meaningless. I may also easily fall pray to misinformation.

Tertiary sources are of course not by themselves horrible. If we look at culture through the lens of constant mixing and remixing of old signifiers, then we are all just the 100th-source of old stone paintings. So I don’t think I’m disallowing myself from having opinions on culture in general, or that I can’t make art myself.

But if we are talking about a specific piece of art, I think we as a society have still not appreciated just the gigantic difference between “making a new thing” and “making something about another thing”. I have immense respect for anyone who actually creates something new, as shitty or cynical as it may be, because to make something where there was previously nothing, you have put a piece of yourself out there. As for just talking about a new thing? Everyone’s a critic. It’s really easy actually.