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That was a bit of a switcheroo. Starting off exhorting us to not dismiss creative works just because they might seem lowbrow, and then revealing that the "entertainment value" you got from a soap opera was to try to imagine how anyone could profitably produce such rubbish! :-D

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I’m not in any way struggling to imagine it, and I’m not at all dismissing it, that’s not what I mean at all. There is no switch. Clearly people do produce content like that and it has a ready audience. I have no problem with that, it gave me a newfound appreciation for the dynamics that make such material successful and its economics.

The switch I was trying to describe was from an appreciation of the content as a consumer of it - to appreciating its existence as an external observer of the process that created it. There is an implicit dismissal of the content itself in the second one, that I found funny. I was trying to be lighthearted, anyway... :-)

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