I like the link this piece poses between paranoia and "Easter eggs," though I think the author elides several important distinctions between "finding Easter Eggs" and that older process of decoding we used to call "close reading." Close reading, the cornerstone of humanistic education, is a sustained act of attention to tiny details across a painting or text that allows the reader to piece together various and transcendent patterns in order to make new meanings from art. That seems closer to what is required to make sense of a Bruegel painting or an extended acrostic in a medieval poem.By contrast, "finding Easter eggs" is just that - noticing one detail that pops out, tweeting about it, and watching it disappear back into the texture of the text. Indeed, the author writes that "unlike an allusion — a tip of the hat to a previous work — an Easter egg, when found, is an anachronistic disruption, an anti-mimetic breaking of the fourth wall to make room for a joke, clue or grievance."  Finding an "egg" strikes me as lazier, less additive, and less imaginative than close reading, and therefore suited to what the author notes is the short shelf life of cultural artifacts right now, as well as the short attention span of audiences. I'd go so far as to argue that paranoia of the kind we see in conspiracy theories comes from bad close reading - that is, finding a single "egg" and blowing it up into a narrative, without the patience or evidence we once found in close reading.

I like the link this piece poses between paranoia and "Easter eggs," though I think the author elides several important distinctions between "finding Easter Eggs" and that older process of decoding we used to call "close reading." Close reading, the cornerstone of humanistic education, is a sustained act of attention to tiny details across a painting or text that allows the reader to piece together various and transcendent patterns in order to make new meanings from art. That seems closer to what is required to make sense of a Bruegel painting or an extended acrostic in a medieval poem.By contrast, "finding Easter eggs" is just that - noticing one detail that pops out, tweeting about it, and watching it disappear back into the texture of the text. Indeed, the author writes that "unlike an allusion — a tip of the hat to a previous work — an Easter egg, when found, is an anachronistic disruption, an anti-mimetic breaking of the fourth wall to make room for a joke, clue or grievance."  Finding an "egg" strikes me as lazier, less additive, and less imaginative than close reading, and therefore suited to what the author notes is the short shelf life of cultural artifacts right now, as well as the short attention span of audiences. I'd go so far as to argue that paranoia of the kind we see in conspiracy theories comes from bad close reading - that is, finding a single "egg" and blowing it up into a narrative, without the patience or evidence we once found in close reading.

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