When I was young my parents bought me a copy of The Guinness Book of Records for a Christmas present, I remember being fascinated by it, it was packed with fascinating information and interesting true life stories, I spent hours perusing facts and records about the human body (worlds tallest man!), the natural environment (coldest and warmest places on earth!) and science and technology (world landspeed records!) but there was one chapter that I always skipped over, that about nonsensical trivialities (most bees held in mouth! worlds largest waffle!).
This was in the mid to late 1980’s, flash-forward several decades to 2013 and I decided to buy my neice the latest edition for Christmas as I remembered enjoying it so much. Having bought it I gave it a quick flick through and was disgusted and disappointed that the whole thing seemed to have been cheapened and trivialised, that chapter I always skipped through seemed to cover almost the entire book with all the other subjects squeezed into small and brief chapters. The information therein was also cut down, whereas the old edition would have various sub-headings (eg: under Fastest Plane would be rocket-powered, jet-powered, civilian, military etc in the new edition that would have a single entry and record). It was much more about cheap entertainment rather than fun education, at least it appeared that way to me.
An example of the dumbing down and trivialisation of society or am I merely behind the times and such simplification is the way forward? Anyone else feel the same way?
I’m with you on this; The GBoWD ceased being relevant or meaningful and became silly years ago. When I was a kid it meant something, now it’s largely manufactured or deliberately contrived biggests and mosts.
I don’t think it has anything to do with society. It’s just the lifecycle of a product.
You start out with a good product that everyone buys. Then to sell more copies you start introducing new, ‘fresh’ features. Eventually the good product gets buried with novelty glurge, and dies.
The book was created in the early 50s as to resolve arguments in bars over the biggest, fastest, best, etc. Now in the information age there are plenty of ways to find this kind of information. They can’t stay in business listing world records in an academic manner, they have to be in the infotainment business to survive now. Without their well known trademark they wouldn’t be around at all anymore. It’s not really surprising when we look at the news media, and popular internet sites. It’s just another thing to be nostalgic about, like things that used to be built to last Guiness is now made to maximize short term profit.
The problem was this: in the beginning, the Guinness Book would search through news sources to find the record in categories that people might be interested in. It started, after all, as a way to settle bar bets – who’s the tallest man? who’s the currently longest ruling leader? I’m sure there was even feedback from the bartenders themselves.
The also listed various physical feats of interest, like “who at the most hot dogs in a setting?” This was the key to their problem. People started doing all sorts of wacky feats to get into the Guinness book. And soon all you’d hear was not the book itself, but how people gathered together to set a record.
The records got more and more gimmicky. Whereas people used to do these things because they wanted to do it; now they did them to get into the Guinness Book. Feats became less and less interesting and basically you get into the book because you want attention, not because you want to do the feat.
I think Wikipedia is the last nail in the coffin, but the first time I can remember it being truly crappy was the Millenium Edition in 2000 which predates Wikipedia.
The Guinness Records Company is now purely a money-making venture. By somehow earning themselves the title of ‘Official Record Overseers’, they have created a fabulous product for these trivial times.
Want to set a record? Even without breaking one? Just fork out a few bob, and the Guinness People will help you ‘create’ a record - and put their stamp on it. This explains all those records that make into the Wacky News Of The Day for things you have never heard of - they are just ads for the company that has paid Guinness.
The brand Guinness World Records was sold in 2008 for 60m pounds - that’s about 100m USD. And remember, they make nothing, need no assets, and require staff trained in how to use a clipboard and a stopwatch - that’s it.
The Internet has, if anything, made their brand stronger.
Same here. That was the one that disappointed me in how it had trivialised itself. Though it had been about ten years since I had last looked at a copy, by then.
There is simply no market for printed reference works. If there is overlap between two editions of the GBR, people are not gonna buy it.
So their choices are to cease publication, or restrict themselves to listing fun-and-everyday records, of which enough new (and exclusive!) ones can be created every year to fill the book.
I bought the last edition in 1997, not coincidentally the year before I started surfing the web. I rationalized the non-purchase with the decline in content, but the causation actually went in the other direction.
The Guiness Book of world records started out as a marketing giveaway from the Guiness brewery. Although a seriously researched book, the purpose of it was from the beginning entertainment first and foremost. The original letter by F. H. Penfold on behalf of Guiness Breweries regarding the usefulness of this book to innkeepers is pretty amusing; " . . .and we hope it will prove useful to landlords, it must, of course, be produced at just the right moment, that is, after the contestants have derived all the enjoyment and thirst possible from the argument but before they proceed to ‘lie direct’."
When I was a kid in the 80’s it was a giant paperback filled to the brim with facts.
Around the turn of the century it had become a coffee table book full of pictures and hard to read overdesigned magazine style layouts. I think it might have been something to do with the TV show they had running at the time.