Thoughts on The Internet, Place, and "Fragmentation"

I was sitting in my living room today, talking on Facebook and playing a quiet piano version of Bon Iver’s “Beth/Rest” (link here). My mom and sister were watching a powered-up television show- I believe it was the monster-makeup reality-competition show Face Off. As my little sister cheered and laughed at the excitement of the drama, I sat calm and contemplative.

Such is the power of the internet. Two people can sit in the same room and have no knowledge of each other. Humans and society are used to being in synch. Space, as it is traditionally construed, is bound to emotion. It seems to me that people feel they ought to be feeling the same thing as those in the room around them. When my sister pulled me out of my music and told me about something funny that happened on the show, I was completely oblivious.

This is what people are talking about when they say that the modern world is “fragmented”. We can live in the same metropolis as people who don’t share our cultural experiences. We can sit down with our extended family and be living utterly different lives. And just as easily, we can be sitting in the same room as people and be miles away.

And yet, just as easily, we can be across the country from others and speak to them like we were in the same room. I’ve shared surprisingly intense relationships, given and received great advice, from people I could never see in real life. And I’m just dipping my toe into the pool of internet friendship, as I am reminded by the closeness of friendships and communities I observe on Tumblr. Not to mention the proliferation of internet humor. The prevalence of humor memes on the internet just shows that none of us have really gotten used to life with the internet. We’re constantly surprised that we have both seen the same silly things scrolling on our screens. The great shared cultural experiences of my generation will not be repeatedly watching Star Wars or hearing of Kurt Cobain’s death, but the inside-jokes we share with the world through Reddit.

The world, this new, digital, cosmopolitan world, is indeed fragmented. But maybe, if it goes far enough, we can reform those fragments into a new, beautiful, conjoined thing.

Just a thought.

The Superhero Vote

A follow-up to my piece on television voters: How would superheroes vote? The recent surge of highbrow superhero films has often carried a political notation to it. I figured I could take a few guesses at the political orientations of these heroes. I’m going here off the most recent incarnations.

Batman: Conservative. Bruce Wayne is a wealthy man, which inclines him towards republicanism. He’s clearly not embarrassed by class differences the way many liberals are, as evidenced by the fact that he still has a butler. But most importantly, The Dark Night is more a conservative parable of evil than anything. Its villain does wrong not to achieve some goal of cruel power. He’s an inherently evil degenerate who wants to drive people away from morality and tear down society. In response, Batman takes many war-on-terror-like precautions, most prominently his radar of hacked phones and computers that clearly parallels the PATRIOT act.

Iron Man: The most recent Iron Man movies paint him as a clear liberal. He uses his wealth to build a green energy machine that his company never wanted to build. He privatizes world peace. He rejects the morality of building weapons of war. On top of all of that, the movie develops some geopolitical sympathy for the Arab victims of United States intervention in the middle east.

Spiderman: Liberal-leaning moderate. In all the time I’ve known Peter Parker, he’s come off as younger and less mature than other relatable superheroes. He doesn’t seem to have a cohesive life philosophy. However, younger voters vote democratic more frequently than the overall populous. On top of that, his villains embody more of a liberal view of evil, such as The Green Goblin, a greedy industrialist heir who becomes a villain in his desire for power.

Captain America: The Captain didn’t just tell a story set in postwar America.  He was postwar America: energetic, pure, and full of the righteous indignation of the common man against the fascist. The era’s politics, in light of the New Deal coalition, was unabashedly liberal, and so was its hero.

The Hulk: The Hulk can’t really get involved in politics. It would make him too angry.

X-Men: I would guess most of the X-Men are pretty liberal. They were written as subjects of discrimination who can be likened to African-Americans or the LGBT community. Their antagonist, Sen. Robert Kelly (R-Fictional) was allegedly based off Joseph McCarthy. In this fictional universe, I’d guess the liberal politicos would be more in favor of the Mutant Rights Movement. (On that same note, does anyone think the Brotherhood of Mutants might be based off the Muslim Brotherhood?)

The Watchmen: The central panic in The Watchmen is fear of a nuclear war and the resulting mutual assured destruction. Both the president in the comic, a heavily fictionalized Richard Nixon in his fifth term, and actual president Ronald Reagan, were conservatives whose relationships with the Soviet Union were tense. If any of The Watchmen wanted to vote, they would go for pro-peace or pro-de-escalation candidates, probably liberals.

That’s all the franchises I can think of. Comment if you disagree with any of these. Happy thanksgiving.

Why Do People Watch Reality Television?

The other members of my family have discovered their latest obsession: reality television. Every night, it seems, they will turn on Netflix and flick over to the latest episode of DC Cupcakes, a truly awful show about a cupcake shop in the capital state fulfilling orders. As I type this, they’re going on their third mental This comes on the heels of their other obsessions like the even more routine Cake Boss or the mental-health tragedy cases of Hoarders: Buried Alive. Their desire to use free time to watch reality television makes absolutely no sense to me.

Cultural critics of reality television have often been dismissed as elitists ignoring the reality of the arts: the pleasure principle. I’m all for pleasure. But they’re watching cupcakes get made. Television could show you literally anything happening in the world right now and they’re showing you some slightly drama-inflated women make cupcakes. And people watch it. Avidly. It’s like some sort of bizarre capitalist fantasy, where the luxury time that we spend our job money supporting is spent on watching other people at their jobs. Marx would have something to say about this.

I’ve been thinking about what motivates the reality TV market. To me, there are some obvious reasons that people watch such counter-intuitively popular shows:

Being better than the profiled characters. Viewers of Honey Boo Boo or Hoarders: Buried Alive get a sense of reinforcement of their own normalcy. I may have some things going bad for me, but hey, at least I’m functioning and have some standards of taste. (Of course, you could argue that the one with less taste is the one who watches tasteless activites, not the one doing them, but there you have it.)

Being worse than the profiled characters. All art- including reality television shows- has an aspect of fantasy to it. The ladies of DC Cupcakes open their show by declaring that they “left their corporate jobs” and “followed their dreams” to start a bakery. Just as a reader of sci-fi dreams how cool it would be to have kickass gadgets, the viewer engages in a happy escapism from a dull corporate life.

Competition. Whatever the context, people enjoy watching competition. I remember how much I got into the one season of American Idol that I watched. To be honest, in my mind, elections play out much like a competitive reality show, but with characters I have stronger feelings about. I would guess that those who watch sports get a similar kick from it.

Redemption. The story of overcoming adversity and immorality and returning to functioning society is just as present in reality television as anywhere. It’s the story of classic poetry, country lyrics, and crime dramas in equal shares. And it’s what viewers of Hoarders and Intervention turn on their TVs to hear.

Morbid curiosity. Here, I’m thinking of shows like Fear Factor. Yes, I remember Fear Factor from when I was in third grade or so. It was that big. The sheer number of emotions inspired by watching a housewife eat roaches blindfolded on a tightrope, with no characters or plot attatched, is enough to keep viewers addicted. Augh! Why? What’s it like? Would I enjoy it? It’s what psychologists talk about as neophilia- the curiosity that brings humans to entertain even the oddest notions and relish it. (Thank you, psychology class.)

Talent. All said, the women of DC Cupcakes are really good at making cupcakes. In the most recent bit I saw, the two were MacGyver-ing a wedding dress from cupcakes and swimming noodles. People just love watching talented people do their thing.

I did a bit of searching and found a few other reasons.

Immorality. In the article “Why America Loves Reality TV” from Psychology Today,[1] psychologist, a group of psychologists claim that fans of reality TV enjoyed watching a lack of personal honor. The survey they cited focused on the TV program Temptation, which focused on people in the process leading up to adultery. Fans of high-quality television like Breaking Bad get some of the same kick from watching Walter White’s descent into methamphetamine-driven madness.

Competition (again). Surveys backed me up on this one- viewers of reality television are more interested in revenge than the average viewer.

Prestige. Prestige is the last thing that comes to my mind in the TV genre that birthed Jersey Shore and Bridalplasty, but viewers of reality television prioritize it higher than average. The psychologists explain that reality television showcases essentially overnight transformations from average person to prestigious superstar, transformations that they can then fantasize about happening to them.

Blending unreality and reality. Going back to fantasy: we can fantasize all we want about magic or sci-fi, but we know they’ll never happen. With reality television, that barrier’s not there. I’m about as likely to build artificial intelligence as I am to win American Idol, but people really don’t understand statistics, and one AI seems a lot more plausible to me if I’ve watched it happen to real people. It’s fantasy, but a much deeper form of fantasy than fiction can provide. Columnist Nicole McDermott points this out in an article on Greatist.[2]

I wonder if reality television could theoretically move up the artistic status ladder and become an occasionally high-brow art. I don’t see any real reason someone couldn’t make a really fascinating reality series, i.e. one actually in touch with reality. It’s got many of the same appealing aspects, just in different capacities.

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[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200109/why-america-loves-reality-tv

[2] http://greatist.com/happiness/why-we-watch-reality-tv/

In Support of Terrible Art

This month is National Novel Writing Month. Artsy types everywhere are cramming at night to assemble a 50,000-word novel by midnight on the 30^th, hoping for a prize from the NaNoWriMo committee. Skeptics, many of them friends with these nouveau novelists, are not happy about the festival, however. (I don’t know any situation in which I’d say skeptics are happy about something, but there we have it.)  Columnists have complained on the internet about NaNoWriMo, calling it an ego project that only serves to contribute to the abundance of awful art on the internet.

Participants in NaNoWriMo have retorted that several published novels, most notably Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, started at projects in the competition. But those who make this defense, as well as the project’s critics, are missing the real point of the competition.

We in the United States and other western nations live in a thoroughly industrialized world. (Point two for obvious statements.) Part of living so enmeshed in an economy is that we must, for perhaps eight hours a day, participate in mounds of work which we may or may not enjoy doing. We subvert our creativity and play into someone else’s economic fantasy. We can look for a job we enjoy, but at the end of the day, we can’t all do whatever we want.

But we want. We want to create. We want to bring something into this world that no one else did or will make. Jean-Paul Sartre understood this when he formulated his philosophy of authenticity. Art lets us feel meaningful, individual, and powerful, all vital human impulses.

It was this economic conundrum that many anti-societal writers have discussed. Another great was environmentalist and “rogue economist” E. F. Schumacher, who wrote in his classic work Small is Beautiful about the tragedy of modern creativity. Because of mass production, one who wishes to work with their own hands must be wealthy enough to create a studio to do so. It cannot be a person’s livelihood to create handmade versions of common objects; it’s simply not economical.

The beauty of the internet is how it has flipped that paradigm entirely on its head. Using the mass-produced and increasingly mass-available computer, anyone can create anything and share it with anyone. Everyone, especially those working drone jobs, needs a creative outlet. It’s why, everyday, the internet fills more with stunning Flickr photography, artsy YouTube videos, strange SoundCloud songs, hilarious Tumblr satires, and, of course, opinionated blog posts. And the platforms are all free.

It doesn’t matter if everyone who reads a NaNoWriMo novel judges it utter shit. It doesn’t matter if nobody reads it at all. It doesn’t matter if piles and piles of disgustingly awful novels sit on the website and never get seen once. What matters is that someone created them. Art isn’t about the best and the brightest anymore, the vision of divinely-inspired creators rising to the top of the art world. Art is about each person as an individual.

To readers participating in NaNoWriMo: Stay sane and keep at it. To my friends who create everything else that makes the internet a better place: keep doing what you do. To anyone who wants to create terrible, terrible art: go for it. No matter how badly you do, you’ll be happier with yourself. If you need me, I’ll be over here blogging.

Web Gems #1

The first in what I hope to be a series. A few things I’ve found scrolling  around the internet in recent weeks.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Blog.  I'm always happy to give a boost to my fellow bloggers. This blog, by playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, is on track to being one of the best blogs of 1959. For a taste, try this choice quote:

         Sunday, 12 July, 1959: 9:55 A.M.
         An angry crow mocked me this morning. I couldn’t finish my croissant, and fled the café in despair.
         The crow descended on the croissant, squawking fiercely. Perhaps this was its plan.
         Perhaps there is no plan.

How to Eat aTriceratops. For this one, I thank my friend Lucy Li. In a wonderful example of the exact opposite of service journalism, the scientific journal Nature published a very serious article on how other creatures ate triceratops. Scientists expect this will provide a breakthrough for nothing ever. Still, it’s kind of awesome, and written with such seriousness it sounds like the author hasn't grasped its ridiculousness.

The Latest xkcd Poster.  Randall Munroe's xkcd, one of the best comics on the web, gave us another fascinating graphic image last week: a graph of the ideological makeup of the US Congress. Few people are as good with data as Munroe. (For those who don't read xkcd, look up some of his old graphics, like his money comic.)

Beautiful Curves. This fascinating HTML drawing app from web developer Tim Holman allows the user to draw colored lines with random curves. If you've got time (or are looking to procrastinate), he's got a web site full of odd treasures.

This Wonderful Pro-Climate Ad. Entitled "Romney vs. Sandy," perfectly sums up my thoughts on this past election. It's passed, but it's still a relevant ad. For related literature, see my blog post on the presidential debates.