So do we over use hyperbole? Yes… well sort of… and also maybe not.
I think the over use of hyperbole is very much in the realm of pop culture. An since pop culture is kind of every where these days it can feel like an all encompassing use of bombastic words.
Yet when people talk about books I hear less talk of inabilities to even and more nuanced treatises of not only what is good or bad but what things mean. This isn’t just people in my peer group but also what I see across the booktube fandom on youtube.
So why do people seemingly have such a strong ability to talk about books while when topics of pop culture come up, like say Breaking Bad, can we only extol how it is the BEST EVER or AMAZING?
I think the difference simply comes from how current society is behind the time in critique of pop culture. Many people grow up in schools where a staple of English class is reading books and finding deeper meaning. Even after people graduate from school book clubs around America and the world meet to not just drool over books with overly positive (or negative) reactions but to point to the parts that succeed and fail in their eyes.
Pop culture does not have a class at school that deconstructs it. And approaching most culture in this serious way is seen as a bit silly. Because we don’t have a muscle for talking about culture in that way I think we resort to words with less intellectual umph.
As TV Critics and other pop culture critics gain more prominence and we become more accustom to taking a more serious look at pop culture I think our general ability to talk about will increase. Because while tumblr is the home of people who can’t even it’s also the home of some smart deconstruction of pop culture.
Deeper conversations are coming and I think it will create a feed back loop that will only make pop culture even better.
On a side note I think gaming has the same problem of no real natural wide spread ability to talk intelligently about games. As criticism gets better and more a part of the every day thinking for games it will only make games better just as it has already started to makes other parts of pop culture better.