Author Archives: Dave

Author, blogger, thinker, developer, and all-around digital creative. Applied theatre professional. Mac enthusiast. Coffee fanatic.

Practical Applications

While there’s a risk of deifying our technological progress, I think that the nature of the information age has raised some really interesting commentaries on our view of ourselves as a society.

Interestingly…or, perhaps, strangely, depending on your point of view…this occurred to me by way of a navigation app.

Just before re-locating to New England, I was turned on to a nifty little smartphone application called Waze. If you haven’t heard of it, this is basically a crowd-sourced GPS application that provides turn-by-turn directions just as your GPS would, while also permitting you to report things like road construction, speed traps, and accidents. Waze’s servers then collect this real-time data, determine where traffic is completely clogged, and then anyone navigating with Waze gets re-routed around the pending hazards.

What’s interesting about Waze is that it incorporates a sort of game component: the more hazards you report, the more points you earn, and eventually you “level up.” This keeps people motivated to use the application, which is important, because the more people who use the app, the better the app becomes. Even driving around with the application running in the background and not using it for navigation lets you take advantage of hazard reports from other drivers around you.

So, what does this spiffy little technological innovation say about culture? I didn’t really appreciate this until I moved and got the pleasure of dealing with Boston traffic every day. The sort of traffic that transforms Interstates into parking lots. I’ve always preferred dedicated devices for things like navigation, because, honestly Garmin has always done it the best. Having input about traffic data has become invaluable when dealing with this volume of traffic for my daily commute, though, and being able to get around major traffic jams has saved my punctuality a couple of times.

And, anyone who knows me will tell you, my punctuality needs all of the saving that it can get.

The cultural aspect, though, is that this is bigger than just being about my convenience. Using this application has made me feel a sense of responsibility to other drivers, because I know that my reports are helping them get around the traffic in which I just unexpectedly found myself stuck, or to avoid getting caught in the speed trap that I just drove by. I feel motivated, not by the game aspect of this application, but by the knowledge that I know that I’m helping other drivers, and that other drivers are helping me, with the shared goal of surviving the least attractive two and a half hours of our day.

We are, in fact, our brother’s keeper. As it turns out, there’s an app for that.

Words of Mass Consumption

Many centuries ago when I was an undergrad student, I was sitting in a communications course analyzing, as I recall, that most obvious method of ideological communication in a society obsessed with automobiles: the bumper sticker. In particular, we were talking about the phrase, “he who dies with the most toys wins.”

A tad materialistic, maybe?

I think about this occasionally because I’m really sensitive to the language that’s used in everyday discourse, because I think that it says a lot about our perspective as a society. In particular, as everything we use shifts progressively into the world of new media, and the music and books and movies we purchase arrive by way of download, I’ve found myself immediately concerned by the fact that verbs such as “listening,” “reading,” and “watching” are replaced by the umbrella usage of “consuming.” I’m sure you’ve heard this used if you’re a bit geeky at all, or even if you’re not. The phrase came as a natural result of developing online methods of carrying data. Much of the data that a website, for example, contains is referred to as “content.” Thus, when we read or watch of listen to the content of a website, we are said to be consuming the content.

The reason that this bothers me is that consuming something is not the same as engaging something. Consuming something is the result of an appetite. The verb carries the connotation of absorbing, using up, or devouring. I don’t want the things that I write to be consumed, because then my words and thoughts are simply one more way of temporarily quenching one’s appetite. I want my readers to engage what I write: to read the post or story or article, think about it, and engage in conversation about it, ideally with their friends and hopefully with me as well. Consuming is none of those things. Consuming is selfishly sucking something up and being done with it.

Consuming is utilitarian, and art of any medium should never, ever be used in a utilitarian manner.

I think that this phrase is the natural result of a culture that places a price on everything and everyone, and transforms every medium of expression into a commodity. My words and your words…or your music, photographs, painting, or however you express yourself…are not commodities created simply to be sold. Our work is more valuable than that. Our thoughts are more valuable than that. When our thoughts are consumed, they are treated as less than what they are. Or than what we are.

“Consuming content” robs us of the value that engaging and discussing the thoughts and works of others could bring. I really think that we should change that phrase, because it shapes the way we think. When we think we want to consume something, we must first possess it. That implies that we always want to possess more as we devour more.

Perhaps he who dies after having consumed the most content wins? That’s not really the culture that I want to be in. Do you?

A Title, A Name, and Second Thoughts on an Ending

Writing seems to come in stops and starts even more so than usual, lately. What with starting school again for a few months, I’ve managed to spread myself pretty thin once more, and so my ideas tend to be transformed into lists that get placed on the proverbial “back burner” until I have time to flesh them out…which usually happens about once every other weekend, or so.

Since my last writing update, I don’t have any working outline for the final section of my novel. Which is actually a good thing, because there’s a part of the ending as it originally transpired in my head that I think is just going to have to be changed because, no matter how I approach it, it feels too gratuitous to me. I feel like its one of those writing moments in which I have to stop the bad stuff from coming out in such amounts that it poisons the good things. It’s going to take some work, too, because it’s a moment of epiphany for a major character, and without that epiphany, the entire plot is essentially pointless. That’s going to require some thought.

On the upside, though, I made a decision on the name of my protagonist…and that is that her name is going to stay what it is, because re-naming her would be way too forced and just wrong. I think I’ll change the way that she spells it, though…that doesn’t leave me with the bad taste that changing her name altogether did.

And I am close…oh, so close…to having a title. So close I can taste it.

That’s the odd part, because I’ve almost always worked from the title down in the past. That is, the title has always been one of the first things to pop into my head when I have an idea for a new project. That leaves me alternately really excited and really uncertain about this project. One thing is for certain, though…it’s going to be different. This project has turned out to be the culmination of this obsession I’ve developed lately with the nature of a hero. If nothing else, I need to finish this for myself to wrap up these thoughts into a coherent whole.

And, in other news, I sold a script today for an old project, and nothing gives you encouragement like knowing that people want to read your work.

Here’s to positivity on Mondays!

Conventional Assessments

I love discussing movies and books with other critical viewers/readers. You know, the conversations that go beyond “I loved that movie, it was so cool!” There’s nothing wrong with that…I just like to know why I liked something, and to have conversations with others about those reasons.

Last night, some family members watched Beastly at Karen’s recommendation. As Karen was out of town for most of the weekend, they talked to me last night about their reactions in light of the fact that it had been loaned to them on such high recommendation by both Karen and myself.

They weren’t impressed.

Now, I would need to go back and re-watch the film to see their criticism in context, but they had really good feedback on the writing, acting, directing, and even lighting. They didn’t just not like the movie, they had very good reasons for not liking the movie. I really appreciated that, because, while there is a lot of art out there of all mediums that’s just inherently bad by any standard of quality, a lot of it comes down to one’s preferences and personality, just as the creation of the art did in the first place.

Our conversation turned to the conventions of certain genres. The big difference in my viewing of Beastly was that it had already been framed for me as a YA fairy tale adaptation. The family who watched it last night came from a completely different starting point: they hadn’t had it framed it at all, they were just watching it as they would any other film. Mind you, that doesn’t detract from or negate any of their excellent criticism, but I think that conventions are an important thing.

For example, when I watched I Am Number Four, I was far from impressed for the first quarter of the movie. Then, I recognized that it was essentially a YA novel on film, and this changed my response to it much for the better. When art is intentionally produced within a certain genre, there are conventions that it tends to follow as a result. We can argue that those conventions, or even the genre itself, can limit that art, but I think that’s a bit of a self-defeating conversation. Whatever the case, though, when a work intentionally belongs to a certain genre, we shouldn’t expect more of it than it is. Once I appreciated I Am Number Four for what it was, I was impressed with the movie, because the things that make a good YA story don’t make a good mystery, for example…and vice versa.

I think that, for that reason, I overlooked many of the things that were critiqued about Beastly last night when I watched the movie. Had I expected the movie to be a fine art film, or the equivalent of a literary novel, then I would have been disappointed. I knew, though, that fairy tales tend to follow certain conventions, and I see those elements as a strength instead of a detractor.

I’m just as likely to read Tolstoy or Salinger as I am a good science fiction novel, and I appreciate them both for what they are. Were I to expect one to be the other, I would be disappointed. Yet, there are still certain markers of quality writing that should belong to both, and the same is true of film: if something is badly acted or directed or lit, then genre doesn’t matter. The craft needed to be improved.

I think I’ll go back and re-watch Beastly soon with their recent comments in mind, because I don’t want to be blind to poor craft in the name of genre.

Do you like genre stories? Are you willing to accept certain conventions within the genre that would otherwise turn you away in a book or a film?