Art 13 | unobtrusive lucidity

Social Media Voyeurism

I’ve a confession to make.

While “Inbox Zero” has been more than a bit elusive for me lately, I did manage to clear out my RSS feeds this morning. That means that, in addition to news, I read all manner of new blog posts, as well as old blog posts that I hadn’t quite gotten around to yet. Blogging, obviously, is very important to me. Yet, several posts into my reading this morning, I realized that I had only commented on two. And only one of those was substantive.

Moreover, what was missing from my feeds was further discussion on a comment chain in which I had engaged in some discussion a few days ago. I suppose I should consider that conversation dead now.

So, as much as I lament this issue in the blogosphere, I seem to have become a part of the problem on more than one occasion. You see, I’m troubled by how we read. By that, I don’t mean the distractibility that comes with jumping around with hyperlinks (a discussion in itself), but rather the idea that we “consume” our media. In fact, that is the phrase that is used to describe how we read and watch and listen in tech circles, as though the words of our authors, the conversation of our actors and hosts, and the notes of our musicians are commodities that we somehow own simply because we’ve purchased them or pay some sort of subscription or access fee. Thus, we “consume” our media. This sounds like a gluttonous act, one that makes me envision some sort of over-filled, greedy eater shoveling more and more into his mouth in order to satiate an appetite that is without end.

The difference, I’ve talked about before, is between “consuming” media, and “engaging” media. The same is true of art. We can take it in, or we can stop to think about it, appreciate it. We can go out to coffee and talk about it later. All of that has to do with “engaging” the art. The same should be true of “engaging” our media.

But what does this have to do with the blogosphere?

Excuse me, because I know I’m reprising a theme here that I’ve already discussed on more than one occasion. However, permit me to point out the obvious that a conversation cannot occur if more than one person isn’t talking. If one person is speaking (or writing) and everyone else is simply listening (or reading), then that is public address, not conversation. When we “consume” media, we read and watch and listen, and then repeat as necessary, feeling proud of all of the information and great art that we’ve taken in recently. But we haven’t stopped to really permit it to impact us. Talking with others is part of how it impacts us. The entire premise behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon was that this was media created and produced by everyone, not just professionals. In blogging (which was originally thought of as journaling), that involves two steps: reading someone’s thoughts, and then entering into conversation with that person (and others) by commenting. Otherwise, we’re missing part of what this whole thing is about.

In recent conversations with friends, I’ve compared this to an audience going to a play, and refusing to respond. Part of what makes a play such a powerful experience is that each performance is unique due to an unrepeatable synergy that occurs between the cast and the audience. Hopefully, the audience will cheer, cry, gasp, and ultimately applaud. Imagine, though, a play that received no audience reaction at all? Proverbial crickets chirping in the distance. Even an audience that booed would be preferable to that, because a silent audience brings an incomplete performance.

I would argue that the same is true of reading a book without discussing it with someone else during or after. Or, similarly, listening to music, seeing visual art…the list goes on. The important part of this process is the conversation, because that’s what makes it a complete event. Even when I don’t comment on other’s posts, I often end up discussing the ideas in that post with someone else. That’s better than silence.

Ironically, other social media platforms are experiencing similar losses of interactivity. How many “Twitter voyeurs” do you know that read what everyone else is saying without offering any words of their own? How many status updates do you actually comment on while perusing Facebook? In how many conversations do you participate on LinkedIn? We’re all to happy to watch everything go by us, somehow thinking we’re doing well to sit back and observe without actually contributing anything ourselves.

Certainly, not every post or video or update invites comment. Further, I’m not looking to place blame for this on one cultural phenomenon or the other, or to come across as whiny because I want people to comment here more (many of you do through one channel or another). The point is that we must, for the sake of ourselves and of our society, stop “consuming” media as we would any other product, because doing so cheapens it. When we “engage,” then everyone participating in the conversation is bettered by the dialogue.

That, I’m relatively certain, is the point.

Photo Attribution: gerlos

Feeling the Bite of Trends

Call me strange, but I just don’t get it.

It seems that, if I wanted to immediately write a book that would generate significant revenue, all I would need is a relatively sound plot arc and some vampires. See, if you involve vampires, you’re bound to sell copy after copy. Vampires are all the rage. On television, on film, in print. Even Abraham Lincoln hunted them, right?

When I was in high school, a friend recommended Anne Rice to me. I can’t remember if I borrowed or purchased Interview with the Vampire, but it captivated my attention. I found it one of those books that I couldn’t put down…something about the darkness of it seemed dangerous, perhaps wrong, and definitely irresistible. I had a poster in my bedroom with the book’s famous tag line.

I remember having a strange dream in which I woke to find the friend who had recommended the book to me, now a vampire herself, standing in my bedroom door, saying that I had touched the book and now something bad would happen. That was weird, but I didn’t put as much weight on those sorts of experiences then as I do now.

I moved on to The Vampire Lestat, and made it about halfway through the book. I stopped. I was squirming. There’s such a thing as too dark, and, for me, this was it. The word that I remember ringing through my head was “demonic.”

Now, I’m not here to preach against a sub-genre, or a type of character, or anything of the sort. I’m not pounding my fist and claiming that your eternal soul is at risk if you read vampire fiction. What I will say about my past experience is this: with the caveat that I didn’t have the literary analysis skills that I have now while I was in high school, those books, as disturbing as they were to me (even then, it took a lot to make me stop reading a book once I had started), was that at least Rice was good at her craft. While I wouldn’t re-read those books today, I respect her as a skilled writer.

And, I think, those two points about that high school experience encompasses my issue with the vampire craze in literature today. First, I have spiritual misgivings about these fictional creatures, and those misgivings were summarized much better than I could ever state by movie critic and author Jeffery Overstreet. He said (and I’m paraphrasing) that vampires in fiction represent individuals who are forever beyond redemption, and that this is why they are so terrifying, because they represent a lie. While we could debate that as a theological absolute, stop to consider the statement. It will cause gears to turn that haven’t turned before, I promise.

My other issue with the current craze is the issue of the literature being well-written. Rice’s books were crafted well, as was Stoker’s original novel. Compare this to Twilight, and I think you’ll find Twilight wanting. At the risk of mixing apples and oranges regarding different mediums, compare this to what appears on television and film with the current trend, which, ala True Blood, is essentially soft porn with a supernatural twist.

I’ll admit that I have an issue with jumping on bandwagons. I avoid most popular trends as though my life depended on it. I think I have good reason, here, however. I have friends whose reading assessments I respect defend Twilight as well-written. Assuming that their assessment is correct, I’ll still stand on my assertion that so much of the other vampire sub-genre offerings we see in print and on the screen are attempting to capitalize on the success of something that is arguably well-crafted, by adding the same type of genre spin onto something that isn’t well-crafted. That’s a sign of valuing profit over artistic substance. And that, my friends, isn’t cool.

These are all reasons for which I find vampire literature inherently suspect. Have you read any of the above, or something of which I’m not aware? Let me know…

Talk Back

I hope this revelation speaks more to the amount of technological progress that my generation has witnessed than to my age, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway. I completed my undergrad in the days when email was in its infancy. Students did not have email addresses issued to us from our schools. I’m not sure professors all had email addresses. In fact, I was a senior in college before I had my first personal email address. Did I mention that I was a communication major?

In that age of yesteryear, I remember one of my professors having a humorous cartoon on his office door. The cartoon detailed the rise of communication from Neanderthal man to the present, and suddenly took an enormous plunge back to where it began when voicemail entered the picture. I didn’t truly understand the humor then…

I had a conversation with someone on Twitter a few days ago after mentioning (during one of those days) that I really shouldn’t have been answering my phone at that point (the end result was that both myself and the person calling were both hopelessly confused by the time we hung up…like I said, one of those days). He commented that he far prefers email over voicemail, and I agreed. My reasoning is that I can take the time to say exactly what I want to say in an email…the variables are removed, and I have time to edit. To a large degree, that reasoning can be applied to social networking platforms, as well. For one thing, I don’t type messages while in a moving vehicle, whereas I easily leave a voicemail while driving. Thus, I’m more likely to ramble or mis-speak something. When I’m writing that message, even in SMS, I glance back over it before sending. The odds of miscommunication and subsequent embarrassment (or flat out unprofessionalism) is significantly reduced.

I think its important to say, though, that all of these forms of communication are secondary to face-to-face communication. Hierarchically, I always place speaking with someone in person above all of the previously mentioned modalities of communication. For that matter, I would even prefer video-calling in an important situation (I’m defining important as moments of human interaction that affect who we are as people…not business transactions). The reason is that human interaction has nuances of non-verbal and paralinguistic elements that can completely alter how a message is transmitted from the sender to the receiver. Someone’s tone of voice or facial expressions make a message a thousand times more expressive than the same message in written format. In person, we instinctively interpret body posture and other clues that complete the message. Written communication does not replace this, because it can’t communicate the full message.

I think that is why live performances in theatre are more powerful than film or television. Partially because the entire person (in character, of course) is present to communicate his or her message to the audience, and, equally as important, the audience is there to respond. A play isn’t complete without an audience, because there’s a feedback loop created in which the actors feed off of the audience’s reactions. That’s why no two performances are ever exactly the same. Similarly, the same conversation will never be duplicated between two people, because those people react to each other in a unique way at that moment in time.

If I’m communicating an extremely simple personal message (like “Happy Birthday”), or a list of information or business detail, then written communication is certainly my preferred mode. Whenever possible, though, seeing and being physically present with the person to whom you are speaking is the only communication that is truly whole, that truly permits human beings to completely interact with each other at the deepest level.

Do you think we’re losing that whole communication? Replacing it with something inferior, something that was only intended to augment, and not substitute for, the real thing? Sometimes, I’m concerned that we’re doing just that.

Photo Attribution: Ed Yourdon

A Review of “X-Men: First Class”

While I had collected comic books for some time before I first encountered the X-Men, they have remained by far my most profound comic book experience. I remember my first glimpse of these literally life-altering characters, on an episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends one Saturday morning, and buzzing with excitement for the rest of the morning. I promptly picked up the most recent issue on my next outing to comic book shelves, and still remember that issue today, as Cyclops, Colossus, Wolverine, and Ariel took on Mystique in a carnival funhouse. I was hooked, and have remained so ever since.

I heard mixed reviews about this weekend’s opening of X-Men: First Class before I could carve out time to go to the theatre myself, both this somewhat flattering review from the New York Times, and this harsh, if somewhat hollow, review from the blogosphere. I went in open to the possibilities, and hoping that the X-Men would find the phenomenal cinematic interpretation that Thor recently experienced. You see, prior to this weekend, the last worthy X-Men movie was X2.

And, after this weekend, the last worthy X-Men movie will still be X2. X-Men: First Class was, sadly, not first class.

The movie continues the “origin” trend that has become popular in cinematic comic book adaptations over the last few years (and apparently is continuing with their comic book predecessors, as well). We pick up here with Magneto’s tragic childhood in a Nazi prison camp, and follow his later meeting with Charles Xavier as they become allied with the U.S government to defeat a plot by the Hellfire Club, introduced well in this movie, who are behind the Cuban Missile Crisis in this version of history. What follows is an unpredictable mesh of mutant history with international intrigue as Xavier forms the first group of X-Men to prevent nuclear annihilation.

The problem is the discontinuity with the classic X-Men story arc. This first becomes apparent as we discover that Professor X has adopted Mystique as his sister, and that the two have grown up together (all together, now: “What the….???”). More overtly, however, this “first class” of X-Men is, in fact, not the original group of X-Men from Marvel’s history, which was comprised of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman, the Angel, and the Beast. Nowhere, in fact, have we seen this original group together as such in the X-Men movie adaptations. This is particularly unfortunate here, because the costume designers for First Class have captured the original X-Men uniforms with superb skill. To find these costumes on a disparate re-casting of the first group of X-Men (only the Beast has continuity) is disappointing at the highest level. The inconsistencies don’t stop, there, however: instead of Cyclops, we see his brother, Havok (as a teen, like most of the others in the group), who has inexplicably been in prison. Moira MacTaggert, who rightly plays an extremely influential role in the film, is not only a CIA operative instead of a geneticist, but also American instead of Scottish. That’s not just odd, but downright wrong.

These examples highlight the larger issue plaguing the X-Men film adaptations, and that is the fragmentation of the history of the characters. Because the original X-Men film introduced the most beloved of the characters instead of the actual first team of characters, others have been introduced at incorrect stages of life in the story arcs (for example, Iceman and Rogue). First Class maintains some continuity with the other films (such as explaining how the Beast works for the government and has known Xavier for some time at his first appearance in X-Men: The Last Stand). However, the discrepancies far outweigh the continuities, even with the other films (how, exactly, does this work with the discovery of Emma Frost and Cyclops at the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine?), because these characters were simply not intended to meld together in the way that the screenwriters attempt here.

The film does do some things right, though, and one of those is visuals. Emma Frost and Banshee, particularly, are extremely accurate visually, and Sebastian Shaw is an excellent and critical inclusion, as the Hellfire Club are the villains here. In fact, the entire cast of actors are extremely attractive people, which helps the movie tremendously. Its just too bad that the same amount of care couldn’t have gone into the writing.

Another positive contribution of this film to the X-Men cinematic canon is that this is the first time the audience understands Magneto, the first time we find ourselves thinking that we can sympathize with how he gets to where he is…similar to how we sympathize with Anakin Skywalker’s transformation to the Dark Side in Star Wars, Episode III.

Overall, however, First Class, while providing great visuals and its share of good laughs, further diminishes the legitimacy of X-Men film adaptations. Those of us for whom the X-Men hold a particularly special place in Marvel’s comic book mythos find it tragically true that even the best of these films were launched with deep difficulties and have grown unmanageable in the end…or, in this case, the beginning. The X-Men movie franchise should either be declared dead, or re-booted entirely.

As for seeing First Class on the big screen, I wouldn’t waste the money from your budget. Toss this one into your Netflix cue, instead.

More…or Less…

I am so over that guilty feeling.

I remember when I first used to get it. The guilty feeling, that is. It began when I was considering applying to an MFA program in creative writing. The school to which I was going to apply (I’m intentionally omitting a link to protect the innocent) melded spirituality with the craft of writing, which was initially much to my liking. I think, in retrospect, that they could be a bit heavy on the religious side, too, because I remember the phraseology that the program used. They indicated a dedication to developing “writing as a spiritual discipline.”

For those of you not familiar with the concept of spiritual disciplines, they are religious practices in the Christian faith meant to heighten the experience and connection involved in specific practices of that faith. They are not without merit. Foster’s writing on the topic is the core of the spiritual discipline concept (at least as it relates to Christianity), and he has much to say that is worthwhile.

Initially, the idea of cultivating a spiritual discipline of writing was very appealing to me. The concept brought images of dedication and higher calling with which I resonated. I determined to develop a religious practice of writing. I delved in.

The problem is, though, that I’ve never done well with consistent religious practices. I’ve always taken liturgy best in small doses, and there are few religious rituals with which I am able to engage in any meaningful way (although the few with which I can are extremely meaningful to me).

So, perhaps this was a recipe for disaster. Because, until that time, I wrote (at least from a creative writing perspective) when I had a project that I was driven to write. I never missed a deadline, and I was not captive of the illusion that I should write only when my “muse” struck. I was disciplined about completing what I was writing…I was just inconsistently disciplined (I remember writing dialogue for a scene in a play once on a laptop in the car while waiting in line for a car wash). A bit scattered, perhaps, but passionately so, and it worked.

The issue is that, when applying religion to a spiritual practice, the inevitable occurred: inhumanly high standards, and increasing feelings of guilt with each failure. I took the advice of many writing blogs that a writer should write every day, in a disciplined manner, for the sake of writing. Every day.

So, judge me if you like, fellow writers, but I have never had a week that I’ve pulled that off.

Moreover, I drove my wife crazy, because I was constantly complaining that I either hadn’t written in two days, or hadn’t written enough, or…well, you get the idea.

Then, a few weeks ago, I read a blog post by an author who recently published his first children’s novel. The post was unbelievably encouraging to me because he discussed his insanely hectic schedule at his day job (and we all have those…the schedule and the job), and that he only made time to write his novel on weekends, blocking out several hours at a time for two days a week instead of one or two hours nightly.

This, to my initial disbelief, was successful for him!

And my feelings of guilt, dear reader, flew away to never plague me again.

With their departure came the realization that not writing every day doesn’t make me less disciplined a writer, or less dedicated a writer, or place me under less of a spiritual or “higher” calling to write. It means that I favor quality over quantity, and blocking off an hour or two (if I was lucky) every night was not only robbing me of quality, but was depriving me of the life that a writer needs to live in order to have material from which to write.

In short, writing, like religion, is about substance instead of frequency, and sometimes, less is more.

I’m going to work on one or more of my writing projects this weekend, probably for a large block of time. And I may not touch them again until next weekend, after which they will have had an opportunity to coalesce in my brain. That will make for a better final product, anyway.

Not to mention a much happier life in between.

Photo Attribution: smoorenburg