An interesting idea from Crooked Timber about the internet, which...

...offers to non-regular TV watchers like me to retrieve the information that we are interested in and no more can lead to deficits in certain kinds of common cultural knowledge. Not the kinds of civic knowledge that Cass Sunstein etc care about – but celebrity gossip, junky pop culture etc.¹ Targeted advertising – to the extent that it actually works – is obviously no solution. But spam, designed as it is to cater to the lowest and broadest of tastes actually provides me with significant information that I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise...

Like Henry, I too am only aware of the likes of Jessica Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan from their propensity to appear in CELEBRITY! NUDE! type spam e-mails, which I am far to highbrow to follow. Like this. Or this.