Writer's Block: Revolutionary Thought

[eumelia]

[Error: unknown template qotd]

Teevee.
Television.
As a sampler and some-times addict of that potent drug I can't help but try and explain.

Commencing academia babble now:
Benedict Anderson wrote about Imagined Communities, the idea that through a non-existent or imagined commonality we establish the community in which we live.
He speaks mainly about the print and literature in order to exemplify this, because News papers are the most reproduced form of literature in the world today - think of those scenes in 1940's and 50's movies in which the frame is filled with men in fedoras and all of them reading the New York Time or the London Times, etc. Are they looking at one another? Do they communicate with each other? Most likely they can barely recognize each others face, but they are reading the same thing and they imagine or consider what they think about they are reading to be social consensus, despite the fact that they most likely would never talk about what they are thinking to another person.
That's an imagined community.

Television takes it one step further in my opinion.
News papers are relevant until the next edition and it takes conscious thought to read and absorb the information and data printed on a page.
Television by its nature, allows you to switch off your cognitive operations and just sponge in what is going on as you watch the screen.
Television has replaced religion when it comes to values as well.
Once in order to know what was right and wrong you listened to pulpits to tell you who was good, who was evil and what one should believe.
Now television tells us who is vilified, what is beautiful, how we ourselves can be like the idols which we worship on the flat screened alter.
Instead of family prayer, a family will congregate around the television and watch the episode of whatever programme we are addicted to at the moment.
And we obsess about it, no less than people used to obsess about god while those who control and create the discourse make some kind of profit off us "sheeple".

Comments

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

And this is why I love fandom. It takes that mind-numbing opiate and turns it into community. There is certainly a degree of Imagined Community in fandom - every time there's a fandom controversy we find out that we don't all agree after all - but some genuine community and analysis too.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Exactly.
I was thinking of writing about that as well, but really, that wasn't the question :)
Also, I have a tag "fangrrl commentary", I really don't need to expound on something that I already do, lol.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Some television still engaged the brain, and invites you to think and be part of it. But increasingly yes, over the last 10 years, (and Big Brother was quite a good example of this), it has embraced the lowest common denominator. Particularly in the way news coverage has been turned into entertainment, and factual programming, also has been turned into entertainment.

Still, at least fewer people are killed over arguments about who Buffys one true love is, than over whose God is best.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

So far! And this is why I always think it's hilarious that sports fans (riots, bashings, glassings, drunken injuries and deaths) are the mainstream, and the geeks are not, especially the geek girls.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Things did come close when Joss killed Tara, for sure. :)

*absently takes a moment to reflect on how utterly fabulous geek girls are*

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

We are fabu... :D

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yep, you really are.


When I was younger, school and university age, girls just were not into sci-fi/fantasy/computer-games/etc, geek girls were so incredibly rare. I think it all started to change when the internet came along, and Buffy started.

(Not un-coincidentally, when I was younger, I was not terribly interested in girls. They were incredibly boring, interested only in clothes and hair and shopping.)

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean.

I started my geekery when I was seven and saw Star Trek:TOS for the first time, but felt really alone in it with only my big brother to talk to about it.
Then when I was 11 a teeny tiny two day con began and it eventually morphed into the big local con of five days and over seas guests
but only when I was about 16 did I feel a part of something and not like a freak with a bunch of other girl freaks.
And to remind you, I'm only 23.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

About 7 years ago. Yeah, that sounds about right. I was thinking 7-10 years.

I know a fair few women who were converted by Star Trek ToS, but as with you, they never really felt able to talk about it. Or come out of the closet as a sci-fi fan.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

I've been reading X-Men comics for 19 years and started playing D&D in 1986. While there weren't many girls, there were always some of us, and I lived in a tiny little conservative rural town in Australia with no cinema or bookshop - we had to make our own fun, I suppose! But there was no shortage of Dragonlance fanfic in notebooks... When I got to university in 1994, there were geek girls everywhere, running most of the fan clubs with the exception of Doctor Who.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

"Who" fandom (within it Torchwood) is so underdeveloped here!

Boo.

Fandom and Geekdom in these here parts are equal in men and women, girls and boys, though to me it looks like girls start geeking out in public a wee bit later, but that's beside the point.
At the con I mentioned there are def. eqaul amounts of girls and boys now more than ever. When I was 11, 12, 13 there weren't that many. Only later did I notice a surge in fangrrl and girl!geeks.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Spock was my first fandom crush at the tender age of seven,
It's tragic, I think I was ruined even then.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Spock? Really? :)

I think mine was the Princess from Flash Gordon, played by Ornella Muti.

[sabrina-il.livejournal.com]

Without going into my own thoughts on the subject, I'd simply like to pipe in and highly, HIGHLY reccomend to you the book Lullby (http://www.amazon.com/Lullaby-Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/0385722192/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226142353&sr=8-1) by Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club), because it's specifically his answer to the question "is TV and media in general the new opium of the masses?" and besides, is a pretty awesome-wonderful book. Just saying, in case you ever come acorss/get the chance to read it.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I love Chuck Palahniuk. Thought the movie adaptation of "Fight Club" was very loyal to the book.

[sabrina-il.livejournal.com]

Ooh, cool, have you read his other works? I've read everything up to and including Haunted which is when I decided I really didn't like his new direction and stopped following his books. But everything up to Diary is in my heart for ever and ever as some of the MOST wonderful literature.

I actually thought Fight Club the movie was... better than the book, lol. I think the book was... too cluttered, he tries to put too much stuff in there, whereas the movie focused on a few things and tossed other things out and made it PERFECT. I saw the recent adaptation of Choke and it's... less good than Fight Club, lol. My favourite book of his is Survivor.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Wow you are a fan! :D

No, the only other thing I read of his Diary, which I found disturbing... then again, what else do you expect from Chuck. hehe.

[sabrina-il.livejournal.com]

YES I REALLY AM :D

Yeah, see Diary is when he was already going for... something entirely different than what say, Fight Club was about. Fight Club, Lullaby, Choke, Invisible Monsters and Survivor are all books of more or less the same caliber. They each tackle a certain array of social subjects, combined with Palahniuk's blend of crazy disturbing characters/humor/situations, but they are all, at the end fo the day, commentary on social issues, among other things. VERY broadly, I would classify Fight Club as Daddy Issues, Chocke as Mommy Issues, Lullaby as his commentary on media, Survivor as commentary on religion and Invisible Monsters his commentary on gender.

Diary is heavier on the crazy-disturbing and much lighter on the social commentary (People Are Mean isn't really a Chuck-worthy level of commentary, you know?), which is why I liked it a LOT less. But then, I can't stomach horror in any way shape or form, and the only reason I'm totally cool with it with Palahniuk is because he makes it clear that the horror is serving a purpose isntead of being just randomly disturbing for its own sake (whcih is fine! just not for me), and starting with Diary Chuck went further and further into disturbing and left social commentary behind. Whiiiich, really turned me off, lol. So, I'd say to get a picture of the kind of Chuck you get in Fight Club, read something written earlier than Diary, if you're ever so inclined :D

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

So true! (Sorry, this is going to turn into me geeking out monologue-style; I hope it's also engaging what you were getting at and/or interesting!)

Religion is defined (well, by Otto anyway) as that which provides a numinous experience, that lets us get outside ourselves. As a result, it can function as an opiate - if we can escape beyond ourselves, there's less incentive to fight being oppressed. With the written word, however, people started articulating and recording their individual experiences, and this created a fundamental shift in how they thought about the world (think of the secularization hypothesis), and they started sharing their individual experiences. A big part of what I got out of Anderson's work was that widespread literacy allowed for the formation of communities because people who couldn't communicate orally in the past were now able to do so verbally. Television retains that quality partly because body language and vocal tone communicates a lot even without words, and partly through dubbing and subtitles. At the same time, t.v, particularly reality television, goes back to much of the role played by religion - viewers can identify with the people on screen and thereby both escape themselves and bond with a larger community of viewers. Reading, for all that it can foster "imagined communities" and/or be a form of escapism, is a decidedly individual activity, whereas both religious observance and television watching, even if done alone, are all about feeling something other than your individual emotions.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

#1 Articulating my points fantastically.

#2 I love geekery monologue style, what's a blog without it?!

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for formulating. I disagree with your analysis at a number of points, but mainly in the conclusion. I do not see the function of tv programming as much different from that of novels and news papers. It's just that it uses a language which is easier for us to comprehend and produces a more immediate impact, as well as is impossible to "put aside". Yet, popular written texts strive to possess the same quality of grabbing the reader's attention and not letting it go, while art works in the genre of moving picture can easily be "put aside" and reviewed indefinitely. Also think of cult movies.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

When I refer to getting outside yourself I mean not just having your attention grabbed but the feeling that what's grabbing your attention is somehow tied in with something bigger than yourself. Much as I've gotten sucked in to books, it's been with the characters and worlds that the author creates, not with a broader real-life community. By contrast, the books that Anderson cites as fostering nationalism aren't the novels that allow readers to identify emotionally but the non-fiction that allows for analysis of the socio-historical situation.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean about cult movies...?

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

Books that "foster nationalism", or any other set of values for that matter, are imo precisely those that can grab the attention of many people through emotional connection to characters who act in specific (politically non-neutral ways) ways. It works well when the reader does not think of the content as political in nature. There is some sort of a strange tendency in some layers of society to view books as inherently more politically progressive and otherwise more mature and beneficial than television. This is a result of a misunderstanding and constitutes little but usual intelligentsia snobbery. Yes, some books do make you think more than most moving images, but those books are nowhere near the mainstream of the publishing industry. One also has to remember the relatively young age of the moving image technology and its higher costs.
On what grounds do you claim that tv watching is mainly about "connecting to something bigger than yourself" in a way novels aren't? I don't understand.
Cult movies are good examples of motion pictures that were turned into (theatrical, ritualistic) close resemblances of written texts. They are broken apart, taken out of context, paraphrased etc - fans treat them the way one traditionally treated a written text. Also, think of tabloids. No connection to bigger than life celebrity life?

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

I'm differentiating between identifying with a character and being motivated by that to take a political action and feeling part of a societal group. Based on my personal experience, I think that books can definitely do the former but don't do the latter, whereas television can. If anything, I think that the example of cult movies supports that idea. Huge groups connect with them, whereas even the most popular books generally only inspire a small elite to break them apart, take them out of context, etc.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

I'm differentiating between identifying with a character and being motivated by that to take a political action and feeling part of a societal group.
But... why? They are so interconnected. You connect to someone, you begin to emulate them in some ways, to think like them about some things, no?

Based on my personal experience, I think that books can definitely do the former but don't do the latter, whereas television can.
That's because your experience doesn't include living in pre-tv times :).

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

My point is that there's a difference between beginning to emulate/think like a person and feeling part of a large group. There are texts that prompt the former (Uncle Tom's Cabin comes to mind), and there are texts that give people an intellectual reason to want to form or maintain particular large groups (Paine's Common Sense comes to mind), but as for texts that foster *feeling* part of a large group, I can't think of any examples from pre-T.V. times or since whereas there are plenty both in the spoken word (JFK's inauguration speech, for example) and in television (American Idol).

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

as for texts that foster *feeling* part of a large group, I can't think of any examples from pre-T.V.
Soviet lit played this role for many people for a long time. For Russian intelligentsia the books on the shelf are to this day a very clear status marker (which already has to do with the iconic and symbolic meanings of the book, not with what it says).

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

But if that was just the case for the intelligentsia, then it confirms my argument!

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

In pre-tv times it wasn't an elite. Of course, there was a layer of the population that didn't read (much) and was harder to reach, which, one is to suppose, is precisely why the communists set literacy and cheap book prices as top priorities. The way I see it, the audio-visual language of tv is simply more accessible to the average brain, and is hence more utilizable for any sort of broad-scale mind control.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

In the U.S. context radio was more important during t.v. during the second quarter of the 20th century. What role, if any, did radio play in the first couple decades of the Soviet regime?

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

The role of the party's herald :).

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

What role did radio play relative to texts? Which was more prevalent among "everyday people"?

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

I цame across such hilarious soviet statistics texts trying to find a rigorous answer. The truth is I'm a bit lazy and not geeky enough to dig for relevant research. Maybe if I feel like it later I'll get back to you, if you're interested.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

The last sentence sounds a bit off, sorry. I was trying to articulate that I feel now I have to (research radio vs written press) but at the same I don't want to do it right now :).

[bitter-moss.livejournal.com]

True. Thanks for posting was an interesting read :).

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

*bows*

Thanks for reading!

[bitter-moss.livejournal.com]

No problem i always enjoy your entries ^_^.

[ephraim-oakes.livejournal.com]

i think that may have been true of television 10 years ago, there is now so much television and so much other media that now people aren't watching/doing the same thing (steven colbert called this phenomenon 'crumblicious'). i see this among the undergrads that i teach - everyone has their own custom blend of music, podcasts, tv that they download or netflix or tivo, that it's rare to have the kind of situation where someone references a tv show and have the majority of the other students get the reference. that kind of thing was common, when i was in high school in the late 90s. so, people break off into ever smaller subniches ('microcultures' to be technical about it) where do they have common reference points - so the communities seem to be getting less imaginary (and less opiate-like) by virtue of that.

[ephraim-oakes.livejournal.com]

sorry, my use of commas really suffers in the mornings.

and for what it's worth, i still think religion is the continual opium of the masses - at least here in the us.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I agree that religion is still a heady drug, but religion as a movement is more proactive and provocative these days I feel (in these here parts as well) that people have to think about what they believe.

Teevee is a bit more invidious and insidious than religion is these days.
Just as a personal observation.

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

You can see my response at my LJ

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Ta very much :)

[aesiron.livejournal.com]

I would say it's the internet, or soon will be, instead.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I think the Internet creates real community rather than imagined.
Look at Livejournal, people congregating around each other's lives and personal data, I love it!

[aesiron.livejournal.com]

How many of us are actually friends instead of just acquaintances or voyeurs, though?

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Good point.
Damn.
:)