No, the Internet is not for that thing–I don’t even want to type it–but as you’re aware, there is a lot of it out there. That’s at least one reason, maybe the biggest reason, the Playboy company is showing reduced profits. The company produces more than just the magazine, but to focus on that part of it, subscriptions are down to 2.7 million now. Similar magazine appear to be down as well, though there numbers are only in the thousands. As Carl Trueman points out, Playboy’s decline isn’t a reason for cheer. It is only the decline of our popular culture.

Our decline isn’t only that photos from indecent to raunchy are available online for free. It’s also the abundance of celebrity gossip. The other day I was thinking of writing Fox News in an effort to make the case against their celebrity news coverage. Why does it call for so much media attention? I don’t want to see any more headlines about the Pitt-Jolie-Aniston thing. I don’t want to be aware that some actor said something revealing in some interview I would have missed had it not been for news flashes and clumps of headlines on a web page. I saw something about Hugh Hefner losing and regaining a girl to sleep with–that’s nasty. Why is that news?

Most people (87%) appear to agree that we see and hear too much of it, and I think it contributes to the sexualization or maybe the pornographizing of the exposed.

This calls for moral courage, for a defense of public decency. I don’t think worrying about the marketing of it or the business realities will help, such as the way celebrity news is discussed in this Guardian forum from last summer:

From an individual point of view, Tkacik said her job requires a weird combination of needing to know everything that is going on to an almost obsessive degree.

“It’s like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, about a guy who is soulless but knows everybody’s name and rank. And you need those people to make sure your site gets updated,” she added.

“Most editors, journalists and creative types are interested in what we’re interested in – I don’t want to post eight times a day. It’s constipating. If this is the future of journalism, get out!”

I guess I’m just whining though. We suffer from too much from a popular vice, gossip–a strong candidate for being counted among the Seven Deadly. Too many in the media will argue that we want to know this news or that if they don’t do it someone else will. Nothing will change.

But I wish it would. Perhaps, we’ll have a fragmentation of our culture, pieces of folk, city, country, church, and others all eschewing pop culture feeds and stirring up their own stories, news, and songs. There’s no harm daydreaming about it, is there?