Quantity versus Quality, Part I

I’ve long held the belief that quality is far more important than quantity, at least as far as media goes. I only have time for a few media experiences, so I want those to be the best they can be. But I’m now thinking that this general rule breaks down when I am the author rather than the audience.

I’ve noticed something with content on the web. While 90% of everything may be crap, when enough crap gets put into the same place and follows the same themes, it stops being crap. Long running web comics may start out terrible, but somehow they transform into something worthwhile. I may still look at the end result and be dissatisfied, but every web comic that has passed a thousand strips has a fan base. I think this has to do with quality being found in depth, and the indirect relationship between quantity (within a common frame) and depth.

I define depth as the number of connections in a system, while complexity is the number of individual nodes. While it is possible to have a very deep system that is not complex, it is much harder to have a very complex system that is not also deep. If a system has only a handful of nodes but they are all connected to everything else we have a non-complex system that is very deep. Conversely, if we have a system that has only one connection per node, but has lots of nodes, then there may not be much depth per node but the total complexity level still leads to some depth overall. Depth is desirable for creating meaning, and while it is often preferable to have depth without complexity, this is not a hard rule. Depth through complexity is better than no depth at all.

Now complexity is interesting. Systems that are constantly modified tend towards complexity. When modifying a system, more time is usually spent adding to it than removing from it. This is especially true of narrative frameworks that exist in the mind of a reader. Even telling the reader that “it was all a dream” doesn’t remove complexity. In other words, any narrative system that is extended over a long period of time will grow in complexity. And as a narrative system grows in complexity, so does its increase in depth.

In other words quantity seems to trump quality. Here it’s not that quantity is better than quality. Quality is certainly more important. Rather, we can see that quantity often leads to some degree of quality. The inverse cannot be said to be true; quality doesn’t create quantity. Further, in most cases having both quality and quantity is more desirable than just having quality. This suggests that focusing on quantity first is far more important – even if quality is the long term goal.

This property of narrative contexts doesn’t necessarily extend to non-narrative contexts, such as this present essay. However, I believe there is another fundamental way that quantity is more important than quality in any work in which one plays the role of author. I will examine what this way is in Part II.