Wednesday, September 9, 2009

NY Magazine's Approval Matrix

Every week, NY Magazine publishes an approval matrix. It looks like this:

 
(Big image, click to make it bigger)
They rank various entertainments, events, and popcultia on a range from highbrow to lowbrow, and brilliant to despicable. 
Check out the approval matrix from this week. Think about the following while you're reading it:
  • Who is NY Magazine's audience?
  • How can you tell this from the matrix? What do they assume the audience knows and understands?
  • Do you get most of the references?
  • Do you agree with the highbrow/lowbrow assessments? 
  • How does it seem that they determine highbrow or lowbrow?
  • What things does the magazine seem to value highly? What does it dislike?
  • What does this say about the values of the NY Magazine audience?
 We'll chat about this in class on Thursday... have a great Wednesday night, everyone!

1 comment:

  1. I was actually going to mention this Matrix after reading about High Brow and Low Brow! I just want to mention that last year, NY Mag included the Kimmel occupation.. under Low Brow and Despicable (if I remember correctly)..

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