Perhaps the defining cultural buzzword of 2007 thus far is snack culture, the new multi-channel phenomenon of people consuming lots and lots of empty entertainment calories via streaming video, mobile phone and the like. Short snippets, song clips, movie trailers, innovative spots, 20-second video games, the various forms of snack culture may be dizzying in their variety, but essentially all are the same. They allow us to steal a few moments of diversion via the tools of our oversaturated, overstimulated lives.

And now, the fine folks at Sony, concerned about how best to monetize the thousands of hours of archival footage in the library of television shows from 20 or 30 years ago have cooked up quite an interesting new twist on snack culture. Enter the Minisode, a 5 minute compression of classic hour long action shows such as Charlie's Angels and TJ Hooker, coming soon to a channel on Youtube soon.

According to a recent article, the idea came from things like "Seven Minutes Sopranos," a crafty Youtube hit that compresses all the action on HBO's hit series thus far into a seven minute short. EMERGE however thinks the minisode paradigm is far better used not to create abridged versions of tv shows which Sony readily admits are not exactly paragons of broadcast excellence, but to create original entertainment ideas. Take for example "Explicit Content Only" a hilarious MP3 edit of NWA's scandalous hip hop classic "Straight Outta Compton" where all the lyrics except the swears have been edited out. Sure it's a bit inappropriate, but rather than truncating the album while attempting to preserve it's narrative arc, the creators of Explicit Content Only have made an original piece of art that comments not just on the original, but society's obsession with vernacular propriety. See also the hilarious Scarface: The Short Version which is a distillation of the Pacino classic where all dialog and plot has been removed except for the film's record number of times the word "fuck" is uttered.

Granted the narrative intent of these two older incarnations of snack culture are not the same as Sony's ambitious new online network scheme, but for EMERGE, they are far more original and are a far greater representation of how all this new technology and means of artistic production are actually changing the entertainment landscape. Rather than getting our snacks from big brother, people prefer to do the cutting and trimming on their own, posting up the results for the world (wide web) to see.

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