I Haven't Heard Of It Is Not Useful Information

This little article about people who haven't heard of Arcade Fire is one data point. I haven't heard of it isn't useful information because the entertainment universe is so large that one percent of the avaliable entertainment can occupy your entire entertainment time and money budget for a year. I have about 400 DVDs on my netflix list. I will probably only get to 100 of them this year, and by that time, hundreds of other DVDs will have been released.

And of course, watching movies, tv shows, and anime are not my only hobbies, and I only have so much time to consume information on these. And even within hobbies, to save time, I will not look up information on every single manga produced in a year. If people I 'know' start talking about a series or I see it either on a physical shelf or reccomended on amazon, I may look up more information. But that of course leaves out many parts of the hobby- I'm much less likely to hear about GIANT BOOBS OF THE DEAD than Sensitive Exploration of Teen Angst: Now With Bishies. So me not having heard of a certain anime tells you nothing more than what websites I read or what someone might have mentioned in passing on twitter.

Another issue is that to be a hit, you can sell a million or half a million, but even just America has 300 million people, so the vast majority doesn't even have to know something exists for it to be a huge hit. With hundreds of channels, and the entire internet, it's not important whether we've heard of Arcade Fire or Princess Jellyfish or Chopped, but whether you bring full enjoyment to whatever you consume.