"A Relatively Serious and Un-Ironic Reflection" or "Towards Post-Irony"

In the far-too-copious conversations about pop-cultural icons like The Jersey Shore and Rebecca Black that I've had with intelligent friends, there exists a general sentiment of permissiveness amounting to: "I like it ironically." It is easy to empathize with this approach to consuming the patently awful cultural capital circulating nowadays. I will be the first to admit to enjoying Megashark Versus Giant Octopus or The Room. But I am careful never to impart real (as opposed to South Parkian "Internet") money to the creators. "Why not?" you may ask. "Why do you so despicably utilize YouTube and BitTorrent and all these unethical copyright-infringing mediums (allegedly)? Aren't you depriving ingenious individuals of the money they earned by delivering these products?" The answer is: yes. Yes, I am depriving creators of money for their content.

Remorselessly.

The problem is that when money talks it always invokes the same line from Oliver - "Please, sir, I want some more." Nielsen does not possess the technology to discern, when you DVR an episode of John and Kate Plus 8, whether you are doing so because you are a super-cool ironic "hipster" (i.e. vapid) or whether you are doing so because you think this is just about the greatest thing to happen to Television since Technicolor. It's all just money.

This is the great thing about contemporary internet culture - you don't necessarily have to pay up front for the peep show.

By all means - pay to see the thing the first time. But if you are going to complain about how shitty each and every episode of Dancing with the Stars is, why are you contributing your viewership to each and every epidsode? You're much better off catching The Soup (I'd call it "earnest irony") or snippets of embedded videos in satirical blogs (hint hint) if you'd prefer to see those sorts of shows go off the air after having had your laugh.

Rather than continue into the realm of pure diatribe I'll just say this:  if you want to laugh at the equivalent of gilded shit that is circulating on Television, Radio, the Interwebs or any of the other sundry media outlets to which we have access in our singularity-approaching modern times, don't get it directly from the source if you don't approve of the source; that's how Snookie comes to receive more money for speaking engagements than Toni Morrison. Access it through an unironic or satirical secondary source (The Onion, for example). If you happen to find something you do like through one of these outlets, go out of your way to sling green toward the creators. You have more control over who gets your dollar now than ever before, so why waste it?

Sidebar- don't be ironic because it's what all the hipsters are going. That's un-ironic irony, and it subverts the subversiveness of the indie culture that hipsters purport. The truth is is that hipsters are not indie; indie is earnest. If you can't reconcile irony and earnestness you should just stick to the latter. If you can reconcile irony with earnestness you should really be doing stand up.