Chris

Idle Thumbs 152: Piercing the Fourth Dimension

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I think it's interesting that Chris talked about how this modern generation is weirdly pop-culturally omnivorous, such that we walk around constantly making references to pop culture and so on. I'm not really sure this is, as he claims, a recent phenomenon - if you go back a thousand or so years and read St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, or a few hundred years and read Milton or Montaigne, you'll realize that these motherfuckers also can't go a paragraph without making a reference to something (the Bible or Aristotle or other philosophy and religion for the first two, basically everything for the second two). I think maybe the impression that this is a new thing is just that for a while, this whole "reference other stuff" culture was entirely confined to the people with education who could read (and fucking memorize) all this shit in Latin and Greek and so on, whereas nowadays, since culture can be pop culture in addition to "high" culture, more people can do the reference thing (and it's more obvious to us when they do it because we don't need to know about what Aristotle said to realize a reference is being made).

The discussion about Polygon's style guide and the NYT style guide was fun. I really like thinking about (and listening to discussions about) writing that are reflective in these sorts of ways. Tom Francis has an article sort of about this and I swear some other person (Kirk Hamilton, or Evan Lahti, or some other friend of the show?) had another really interesting one about game reviews. I wrote one for my own review site and putting into words the sort of things I think about how I write reviews was really interesting. I teach writing to college students, in the context of writing about great works of literature in the Western canon, and for a lot of the students (who are mostly engineers and pre-med and so on) it's often a real struggle to get them to appreciate that writing is vastly complex and encodes all sorts of assumptions and tropes just by virtue of saying one thing or another. The sorts of cliches the Thumbs were talking about are just the most easily noticed tip of the iceberg. Language is such an intricate, complex, amazing thing and it's painful that game reviews usually make a fucking hash of it for all sorts of reasons. (I'm glad that Polygon is trying to combat this a bit.)

I really liked the talk about Eddie Murphy's bigotry about homosexuals. I can't remember if someone in the podcast said it or I was just thinking it, but I love the idea (and I find it really crucial) that in the future we're going to look back on the sort of comedy we do today and see discordant stuff just like we look back at Murphy and see discordant stuff. I think understanding this and realizing that making comedy, even edgy comedy that's informed by (and even driven by) socially progressive viewpoints, doesn't automatically insulate you from saying vile, awful shit that you'd realize is vile awful shit if you could go into a future where oppression isn't as bad and the group you're saying vile awful shit about actually has a voice. I tend to think of myself as a pretty funny person, and I make a lot of really edge/dark/potentially offensive jokes, but I like to think that I never (or rarely ever - we all make mistakes) "punch down," which is as good a way of summing up the issue as any. We need to be really cognizant of who we're attacking and dismissing and potentially hurting when we make jokes, and make sure we don't make the sort of jokes that people will look back on in 20 years and say "holy shit." To do that, though, you really need to be on the forefront of understanding discrimination and racism and sexism and ableism and so on in society, and you need to be acutely aware of your privileges, whatever they are.

This is the ultimate irony, I think, of the people (including the many infesting this thread like a bunch of racist roaches) who think they're fighting on the side of comedians when they take on "social justice warriors" like Danielle or myself or many other regulars here. They think that comedy needs to be protected against the evil forces of opinionated naysayers who want to keep it from making all the choicest jokes about minorities or whoever, but in reality that's the last thing comedy needs. What comedy needs is to be like Eddie Murphy's 80's standup minus the shit that 20 years later strikes us as vile. (Actually I guess it's 30 years - holy shit it's 2014.) The way to protect comedy, to let it thrive and to have it serve as a vehicle of real social change and entertainment we can wholeheartedly enjoy without hurting anyone and without perpetuating social problems that we ought to be fighting against, is to be cognizant of the sorts of issues in precisely the sorts of ways Danielle and the other Thumbs often are, and to get shouted down by a bunch of misandry mooks every time you try to bring up the problematic aspects of something is just to ensure that the thing remains problematic and some day becomes a toxic remnant of how awful we were to each other rather than an all time comedy classic.

I was tremendously gratified to hear Danielle say such nice things about my game review site (it's "awesome," she says!) and I think I detected pride in Chris' voice when he talked about how it came from someone on the Idle forums. So yeah, I'm pretty great. Also Danielle I emailed you about being featured as a Subjective Reviewer of the Month and you didn't get back to me so uh, please do that.

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This is an incredible thread. I was worried, when I saw it was 12 pages, that it would be full of, well, the sorts of posts that were popping up in the first couple of pages. This is all amazing and insightful discussion though.

 

First, I'd like to add my voice to the chorus saying Danielle is a fantastic guest and I'd love for her to be a regular on the cast. I think this is especially worth mentioning in light of the aforementioned posts on the first couple pages.

 

I've been reading the discussion on the intent and moral onus behind easily misinterpretable work with great interest. This is something I think about a lot and, frankly, worry about a lot. I won't go into any detail, but as a hobby/side line I do some work which could easily be (mis)interpreted to have a vile message -- and that is completely not the message I intend, but I know for a fact that if I put it out there then that is, without fail, what certain people who are predisposed to receive that message will get from it, and will subsequently parse as support for their gross beliefs and/or attitudes. As well, it can be assumed that certain people will believe that I myself endorse and engender beliefs which are antithetical to those which I hold in real life. This really bothers me, sometimes, if I think about it too much. I can't change the work to be less easily misinterpreted without undermining its honesty and quality, since its merits rely to great degree on its visceral impact.

 

This is one reason why I have tremendous respect for Dave Chappelle and his decision to stop doing lucrative and high-quality work because he observed a troubling social impact, and I sometimes wonder if I should stop as well. At the same time, I feel like it's worthwhile, like any art that prods at sore spots and feels wrong is worthwhile, because it's shows us where the wounds that are raw lie. In the end I always decide to keep at it, but I'm never sure if it's because I believe that it's the right thing to do, that I think it's helpful and revealing, that I believe it is, in the grand scheme of things, a greater good, or just because I'm not ready to stop yet.

 

I think, maybe, it's good just to think about these things, and to talk about them. The more discussions about things like this occur, the more readily we can see beneath the surface of a work, and see it for what may be, beyond the obvious.

 

I don't know. Sorry if none of that made sense. Just, as I said, something I've been thinking about a lot, and something I've been working through. Incidentally, anyone else interested in the troubling ways intent intersect with the end results of art may want to read Kurt Vonnegut's 'Mother Night' -- one of my favorite books, even before I started thinking about this stuff in relation to myself.

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I think it's interesting that Chris talked about how this modern generation is weirdly pop-culturally omnivorous, such that we walk around constantly making references to pop culture and so on. I'm not really sure this is, as he claims, a recent phenomenon - if you go back a thousand or so years and read St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, or a few hundred years and read Milton or Montaigne, you'll realize that these motherfuckers also can't go a paragraph without making a reference to something (the Bible or Aristotle or other philosophy and religion for the first two, basically everything for the second two). I think maybe the impression that this is a new thing is just that for a while, this whole "reference other stuff" culture was entirely confined to the people with education who could read (and fucking memorize) all this shit in Latin and Greek and so on, whereas nowadays, since culture can be pop culture in addition to "high" culture, more people can do the reference thing (and it's more obvious to us when they do it because we don't need to know about what Aristotle said to realize a reference is being made).

 

This is exactly the post I've been thinking about making for a couple days now. "Reference culture", if we can just call it that, is thousands of years old and in many cases is the only way we know about many classical and pre-classical works, though some uninspired historian like Eutropius who could only reference better authors he'd read once upon a time. The difference, like Tycho says, is that mass media and now the internet gives us the ability to recognize these references regardless of our education, making reference culture a popular rather than elite phenomenon for the first time. My instinct, as an over-educated academic, is to call this a bad thing, but I'm not so sure. Having works that are all about crosstalk and interconnectivity has to be positive, when all is said and done, no matter how obnoxious they are as a thing right now.

 

I can easily imagine, after the Great Internet Collapse of 2072, some twenty second-century historian revering Family Guy as the Rosetta Stone of twentieth-century Western culture, since it references so many memes and shows how they were thought to relate to each other, although I feel a little sick when I do imagine it. Is this how the readers of Fredegar felt in 643?

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making reference culture a popular rather than elite phenomenon for the first time. 

 

There is still an element of elitism and gatekeeping in modern pop culture references though. Failing to recognize a reference can often prohibit you from being allowed into social communities. The education barriers are lower and it's certainly a lot easier to get information on those references today than it would have been hundreds of years ago, but that elitism still exists in some form.

 

References to earlier, influential works will probably always be a part of our culture. They're a fast, easy way to remind a wide audience that we all have some shared understanding and cultural knowledge. It's only a problem when a reference is used in replace of actually saying something with meaning. Or when making a reference is used as a stand in for making an actual joke.

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There is still an element of elitism and gatekeeping in modern pop culture references though. Failing to recognize a reference can often prohibit you from being allowed into social communities. The education barriers are lower and it's certainly a lot easier to get information on those references today than it would have been hundreds of years ago, but that elitism still exists in some form.

 

But reference culture isn't really predicated on socioeconomic status anymore, which is the point I really failed to make. It's a subculture elitism rather than a mainstream elitism. In fact, mainstream elitism has responded by taking pride in a refusal to recognize (and therefore legitimize) the "new" reference culture. There still exists the ability to shut everyone else down by bringing up a specific footnote from Infinite Jest, but much more common is to have a show flatter your encyclopedic knowledge of 80s television, the possession of which is something almost antithetical to the wealth and social status upon which reference culture used to depend.

 

References to earlier, influential works will probably always be a part of our culture. They're a fast, easy way to remind a wide audience that we all have some shared understanding and cultural knowledge. It's only a problem when a reference is used in replace of actually saying something with meaning. Or when making a reference is used as a stand in for making an actual joke.

 

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that hyper-referential media is the wave of the future. It's just a cultural force that's been around a long time and will probably be more prevalent as the years go on with the internet being more and more of a thing. Family Guy and its ilk are really just growing pains in the popularization of reference culture, which I don't doubt will become less common as jokes like "Hey, I know a thing that you know" become less of a pleasant surprise for audiences.

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I'd hope that if future historians look at Family Guy they'll also be able to look at all the stuff about people bagging out Family Guy for being lazy. There are plenty of historians that we recognise as being full of shit but still important because their mediocrity says something interesting about the time in which they lived.

 

It's fascinating to me that depictions of pre-20th century life often ends up being completely inaccurate because we simply don't know what things look like, and there's all these details we don't even know about. We've got actual footage of much of the 20th century but human civilisation is so much more complex that now we get things like typography wrong.

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But reference culture isn't really predicated on socioeconomic status anymore, which is the point I really failed to make. It's a subculture elitism rather than a mainstream elitism. In fact, mainstream elitism has responded by taking pride in a refusal to recognize (and therefore legitimize) the "new" reference culture. There still exists the ability to shut everyone else down by bringing up a specific footnote from Infinite Jest, but much more common is to have a show flatter your encyclopedic knowledge of 80s television, the possession of which is something almost antithetical to the wealth and social status upon which reference culture used to depend.

I'm not sure that's ENTIRELY true. I feel like if, for whatever reason, you missed out on certain media in your childhood, you're to some extent locked out of that stuff forever. That can absolutely be a function of disadvantaged socioeconomic status. There's no real way to catch up, it's borderline impossible. I wouldn't claim this is on the same level as, say, institutionalized racism, but I don't think it's as class-agnostic as you claim.

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I'm not sure that's ENTIRELY true. I feel like if, for whatever reason, you missed out on certain media in your childhood, you're to some extent locked out of that stuff forever. That can absolutely be a function of disadvantaged socioeconomic status. There's no real way to catch up, it's borderline impossible. I wouldn't claim this is on the same level as, say, institutionalized racism, but I don't think it's as class-agnostic as you claim.

 

That's a fair point. I keep sounding like I'm preaching some egalitarian future of cultural references, which is super gross anyway, but I'm fully aware that there is a definite cutoff if you don't have a TV and you only access the internet from your local library. There's the ability to fill in the context through Wikipedia, but it's an inferior ability and one that those "in the know" take great pleasure in ferreting out, which is culture policing as brutal as Catullus' mockery of Suffenus.

 

It's still just so different to me from medieval reference culture, where monks specially trained to read and write a dead language were packing their chronicles full of references to works of which there were only two hundred copies in the entire world, all only available to other monks or their secular patrons. Even up to the nineteenth century, extreme wealth and leisure were the prerequisites for participating in reference culture, so it's a big enough change for me to note, I feel.

 

I'd hope that if future historians look at Family Guy they'll also be able to look at all the stuff about people bagging out Family Guy for being lazy. There are plenty of historians that we recognise as being full of shit but still important because their mediocrity says something interesting about the time in which they lived.

 

Yeah! Some of the best dissertations and monographs of the last forty years have been written about previously reviled historians of yore who once or twice accidentally said something incredibly illuminating or just plain useful. I'd give a whole lot to travel forward five hundred years and see what the history of the twentieth-first century looks like, compared to our history of five hundred years ago.

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But reference culture isn't really predicated on socioeconomic status anymore, which is the point I really failed to make. It's a subculture elitism rather than a mainstream elitism. In fact, mainstream elitism has responded by taking pride in a refusal to recognize (and therefore legitimize) the "new" reference culture. There still exists the ability to shut everyone else down by bringing up a specific footnote from Infinite Jest, but much more common is to have a show flatter your encyclopedic knowledge of 80s television, the possession of which is something almost antithetical to the wealth and social status upon which reference culture used to depend.

 

I'd say that socioeconomic status still plays a huge part in who gets what references, just in different ways. Now it has less to do with education and more to do with class in the form of people who can afford to invest the money and the time into pop culture. It's certainly less insidious than it's been in the past, because larger parts of the population have access to those resources than ever before, but it's still prevalent enough not to discount. (Not that I think you were discounting it. It's just something that's been on my mind today with all the Internet chatter over the Game of Thrones premiere.)

 

Edit: Oh, I missed all the other responses. Nevermind!

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I'd say that socioeconomic status still plays a huge part in who gets what references, just in different ways. Now it has less to do with education and more to do with class in the form of people who can afford to invest the money and the time into pop culture. It's certainly less insidious than it's been in the past, because larger parts of the population have access to those resources than ever before, but it's still prevalent enough not to discount. (Not that I think you were discounting it. It's just something that's been on my mind today with all the Internet chatter over the Game of Thrones premiere.)

 

I'd really like to see the socioeconomic breakdown for people who are fans of Family Guy. I strongly suspect it's middle-class and white, but it'd be really interesting to see how or even if it fit into the viewing habits of a working-class or people-of-color family.

 

What about Game of Thrones was making you think about this sort of gate-keeping? I've mostly just noticed general excitement, but I'm sure there's something I'm missing.

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I'm not sure that's ENTIRELY true. I feel like if, for whatever reason, you missed out on certain media in your childhood, you're to some extent locked out of that stuff forever. That can absolutely be a function of disadvantaged socioeconomic status. There's no real way to catch up, it's borderline impossible. I wouldn't claim this is on the same level as, say, institutionalized racism, but I don't think it's as class-agnostic as you claim.

 

That sounds less like a cause and more like a symptom. If I moved to the US, I would be at a very similar disadvantage; the problem is more to do with a high barrier to be considered a member of the culture and less to do with references being the cultural determinant. It's exactly the same problem with Middle-Eastern immigrants moving to Europe; they don't have the hundreds of years of shared history and so they're constantly at a disadvantage.

 

Really the core problem is the use of shared history as a cultural determinant instead of all the other things that are shared.

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I've been reading the discussion on the intent and moral onus behind easily misinterpretable work with great interest. This is something I think about a lot and, frankly, worry about a lot. I won't go into any detail, but as a hobby/side line I do some work which could easily be (mis)interpreted to have a vile message -- and that is completely not the message I intend, but I know for a fact that if I put it out there then that is, without fail, what certain people who are predisposed to receive that message will get from it, and will subsequently parse as support for their gross beliefs and/or attitudes. As well, it can be assumed that certain people will believe that I myself endorse and engender beliefs which are antithetical to those which I hold in real life. This really bothers me, sometimes, if I think about it too much. I can't change the work to be less easily misinterpreted without undermining its honesty and quality, since its merits rely to great degree on its visceral impact.

 

This is one reason why I have tremendous respect for Dave Chappelle and his decision to stop doing lucrative and high-quality work because he observed a troubling social impact, and I sometimes wonder if I should stop as well. At the same time, I feel like it's worthwhile, like any art that prods at sore spots and feels wrong is worthwhile, because it's shows us where the wounds that are raw lie. In the end I always decide to keep at it, but I'm never sure if it's because I believe that it's the right thing to do, that I think it's helpful and revealing, that I believe it is, in the grand scheme of things, a greater good, or just because I'm not ready to stop yet.

 

I urge as strongly as any anonymous internet voice possibly can for you not to stop.  Any observation of art is a 50/50 exchange.  The viewer brings their own point of view, ideas and experiences to the content presented by the artist.  If your work is misinterpreted by someone who sees it in a hateful way, that hate comes from them and you did not create it.  You cannot let their hate stop you from making the statement that feels right to you.  If you cut all the sharp edges off of your work. it will lose its shape, and become something that does not actually reflect what you honestly want to say.

 

 

That being said, I still stand by my criticism, which wasn't about the content of the post but the how it was an unfair framing of the conversations that happened in here or the podcast; others have pointed this out as well. I have no patience for that.

 

I don't want to further escalate, but I really don't think it was an unfair framing of what was said.  That said, I come across Danielle's work fairly regularly, and, though I find myself strongly disagreeing with many of her opinions, I hold a high amount of respect and admiration for what she does.  Her writing has been a catalyst that has started many conversations I have encountered in which people who have operated in predominately male oriented environments have grappled with concepts of feminism.  Agree with her or not, she has gotten a lot of people to think in ways they hadn't before.  I hope she sees past all of the flames and rage that are an unfortunately fundamental element of internet culture and recognizes this.

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I'm not sure that's ENTIRELY true. I feel like if, for whatever reason, you missed out on certain media in your childhood, you're to some extent locked out of that stuff forever. That can absolutely be a function of disadvantaged socioeconomic status. There's no real way to catch up, it's borderline impossible. I wouldn't claim this is on the same level as, say, institutionalized racism, but I don't think it's as class-agnostic as you claim.

There can also be a certain class buy-in you need to participate in to feel completely welcome in a community, especially when it comes to references. The indie games community, for example, already has such a depth of referential history that you will be an outsider unless you have the time to spend now to stay aware of what is happening.

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I really liked the talk about Eddie Murphy's bigotry about homosexuals. I can't remember if someone in the podcast said it or I was just thinking it, but I love the idea (and I find it really crucial) that in the future we're going to look back on the sort of comedy we do today and see discordant stuff just like we look back at Murphy and see discordant stuff. I think understanding this and realizing that making comedy, even edgy comedy that's informed by (and even driven by) socially progressive viewpoints, doesn't automatically insulate you from saying vile, awful shit that you'd realize is vile awful shit if you could go into a future where oppression isn't as bad and the group you're saying vile awful shit about actually has a voice. I tend to think of myself as a pretty funny person, and I make a lot of really edge/dark/potentially offensive jokes, but I like to think that I never (or rarely ever - we all make mistakes) "punch down," which is as good a way of summing up the issue as any. We need to be really cognizant of who we're attacking and dismissing and potentially hurting when we make jokes, and make sure we don't make the sort of jokes that people will look back on in 20 years and say "holy shit." To do that, though, you really need to be on the forefront of understanding discrimination and racism and sexism and ableism and so on in society, and you need to be acutely aware of your privileges, whatever they are.

 

 

I honestly think that sort of thing is going to happen forever, and not even through (conscious) malicious intent. One of my favorite comedians is Patton Oswalt, who I consider of the most progressive successful comedians working today. 

 

When there was an internet uproar around Daniel Tosh's awful rape joke at an open mic, he weighed in on it and joke stealing. http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?id=167&page=spew The reason this is relevant is he has a considered take on it, but 5 years ago he was telling rape jokes. And 10 years ago he was telling gay jokes. That doesn't mean you can't have jokes about those things or a multitude of other things, but the way you approach them changes. I believe that you CAN make a joke about anything, but making a joke where it's at the expensive of a victim is not a valid way to do it. The only way to incorporate those things into culture is acceptance and time. We may not even know what innocuous things in our comedy culture right now are going to sound like they're coming from a person raised on purpose to be terrible 25 years from now.

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What about Game of Thrones was making you think about this sort of gate-keeping? I've mostly just noticed general excitement, but I'm sure there's something I'm missing.

 

Sorry, I thought I included this in my earlier post. In the specific Internet peer group that I am in, Game of Thrones and other acclaimed TV shows feel like these unstoppable juggernauts that everyone is watching and referencing. It's really easy for me to forget that in reality, only a very small portion of the overall American TV audience watches those shows, because not everyone can afford HBO (or they're not in the right peer group where they can borrow a friend's HBOGO password).

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I dont think pop culture references can, by definition, be elitist. I don't think "popular culture" is even that relevant of a term; it implies a type of class distinction that doesn't exists anymore. Zeitgeist is a better word for our media landscape than "pop culture".

We have a very broad and shallow zeitgeist surrounded by niches that occasionally get absorbed. Indeed, financial success is usually predicated on that happening.

I think that's why references are so distracting, especially when the work doing the referencing to still nichey; it demonstrates the author's lack of confidence in their work to be able to appeal to the zeitgeist on its own merit. It's like watching someone awkwardly squeezing every hand with every secret shake they know, hoping someone will notice and inform the gatekeepers.

Being elite, being cool, in our society means being relevant to, and being referenced by, the zeitgeist. The brass ring is to be above the zeitgeist but not of it, to define it. A lot of accusations of elitism or pretention (used interchangeably) are a result of the audience noticing a lack of reverence and reading it as the author affecting their own relevance. It's not that they're trying to fake being smart, it's that they're trying to fake being cool.

You can't choose to be cool, only the zeitgeist can grace you with that. You can, however, forego coolness for survival by paying reverence to the zeitgeist through reference (just don't expect any kudos from Famous).

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I think there are some hairs to be split where your references speak the intent of referenced work, compared to popular internet memes and Family Guy, which seem to just acknowledge existence. 

 

Also, the two Umberto Eco books are so soaked in reference I kind of need wikipedia open to make heads or tails of some chapters. 

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I think the raise of the zeitgeist is a very recent cultural shift that was ushered in by the internet and the democratization of media. There used to be very real tastemakers who's coolness was unimpeachable, now the tastemakers are a gestalt of everyone. You can only tell who ISN'T cool. Making references marks you as not being cool these days. 

 

This is also why we are starting to see the affectation of ignorance as being cool. 

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I think the raise of the zeitgeist is a very recent cultural shift that was ushered in by the internet and the democratization of media. There used to be very real tastemakers who's coolness was unimpeachable, now the tastemakers are a gestalt of everyone. You can only tell who ISN'T cool. Making references marks you as not being cool these days. 

 

This is also why we are starting to see the affectation of ignorance as being cool. 

 

I disagree strongly with both making references not being cool and the affectation of ignorance only "starting" to be cool. "Making references" is so broad a topic, and people have always been outcasted for Knowin' Things.

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You aren't cool when you tweet a hashtag, you're cool when you start it. You're cooler when you ARE it. 

 

I don't think the affectation of ignorance even has necessarily anything to do with anti-intellectualism anymore (though it's indistinguishable from anti-intellectualism when this behavior gets brought into other spheres like the classroom). Neil Degrasse Tyson is cool. 

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Sorry, I thought I included this in my earlier post. In the specific Internet peer group that I am in, Game of Thrones and other acclaimed TV shows feel like these unstoppable juggernauts that everyone is watching and referencing. It's really easy for me to forget that in reality, only a very small portion of the overall American TV audience watches those shows, because not everyone can afford HBO (or they're not in the right peer group where they can borrow a friend's HBOGO password).

 

Oh yeah, this sort of behavior drives me a little crazy. Oh, you haven't seen Game of Thrones/Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Girls/True Detective? It is literally the greatest television series ever, you have to watch it...

 

Life is full of all sorts of miserable events, so I'm not going to begrudge anyone for watching something that gives them pleasure. but man I wish more people could move beyond the conversation piece where they are just talking about how good these shows are (seemingly without ever going into detail about what makes them good), and always with the implication that if you're not following this show there is something off about you.

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It's really hard to describe what makes some of those shows so special without feeling like you're pushing into spoiler territory, or giving the wrong impression (like saying Breaking Bad is about a high school chemistry teacher who starts making meth is technically accurate, but also fails to convey what makes that compelling).  So if you're trying to tell someone they should watch it, you end up defaulting to general praise. 

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Sorry, I thought I included this in my earlier post. In the specific Internet peer group that I am in, Game of Thrones and other acclaimed TV shows feel like these unstoppable juggernauts that everyone is watching and referencing. It's really easy for me to forget that in reality, only a very small portion of the overall American TV audience watches those shows, because not everyone can afford HBO (or they're not in the right peer group where they can borrow a friend's HBOGO password).

 

I think that piracy is also an important factor, insofar as anyone with the tech and the know-how can watch whatever TV they want, but that's still a good point I didn't think of. It actually reminds me a little of that Nothing Nice to Say comic about how digital-only punk albums are anti-punk even though their distribution method is more "democratic"... Shit, the NN2S website is gone for good. Well, it was a good comic.

 

You aren't cool when you tweet a hashtag, you're cool when you start it. You're cooler when you ARE it. 

 

I don't think the affectation of ignorance even has necessarily anything to do with anti-intellectualism anymore (though it's indistinguishable from anti-intellectualism when this behavior gets brought into other spheres like the classroom). Neil Degrasse Tyson is cool. 

 

I don't want to be that guy, but trying to quantify "cool" on the internet is probably an exercise in futility.

 

Oh yeah, this sort of behavior drives me a little crazy. Oh, you haven't seen Game of Thrones/Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Girls/True Detective? It is literally the greatest television series ever, you have to watch it...

 

Life is full of all sorts of miserable events, so I'm not going to begrudge anyone for watching something that gives them pleasure. but man I wish more people could move beyond the conversation piece where they are just talking about how good these shows are (seemingly without ever going into detail about what makes them good), and always with the implication that if you're not following this show there is something off about you.

 

Interestingly, at least with True Detective, the buzz bit it in the ass, because it ended up being a fairly average if competent character study and procedural, but people had hyped it into an impossibly dense and stunning masterpiece, so it's probably going to be consigned to the dumpster of history now. Unless the second season is magnificent, too.

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I don't want to be that guy, but trying to quantify "cool" on the internet is probably an exercise in futility.

Trying to quantify "cool" on the internet accounts for a pretty significant chunk of our economy. 

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Oh yeah, this sort of behavior drives me a little crazy. Oh, you haven't seen Game of Thrones/Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Girls/True Detective? It is literally the greatest television series ever, you have to watch it...

 

Life is full of all sorts of miserable events, so I'm not going to begrudge anyone for watching something that gives them pleasure. but man I wish more people could move beyond the conversation piece where they are just talking about how good these shows are (seemingly without ever going into detail about what makes them good), and always with the implication that if you're not following this show there is something off about you.

 

I agree with you! I don't watch a lot of TV (not out of "coolness," but rather I just don't have the interest level) and while I also would wish that the people I surround myself with wouldn't talk about their current favorite television shows forever and ever...people like what they like, and they want to feel like the things that they like are liked by others. The internet's current state makes it a crazy photomultiplier tube for opinions that end up defining the zeitgeist, and it tends to make individual things like shows and movies a much larger "thing" than they actually are, by sheer virtue of the fact that the internet goes on and on about it (this is similar to what Gormongous said above) That's fine! Enjoy things! Feel good about your opinions because they are shared by others! It's quality stuff! The only thing that is bad is that people go from "you haven't seen _____" to "what kind of a monster are you for not watching ___!" It doesn't happen all the time, but I've definitely had to suffer a lot of eye rolling when I say I haven't watched a show, or seen a movie, or whatever, because they assume I'm just trying to be a coolster. I'm not! I won't judge you for liking something! Enjoy Dr. Who! Watch Community! There are more than enough people in the world (who are not me) who are part of your same interest group, so I think it's ok for individuals to not be a part of that interest group and still live a fulfilling life. 

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