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"What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most compliant gesture we can make is to consent to interact on the terms presented to us by our software and machines. "
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Some of my favorite social thought from the 1970s and 1980s emphasizes a point analogous to Lunenfeld’s: activity, participation, interaction, interconnection—these will be the solutions to the alienation of the modern world. In writing on music, especially, the language turns utopian. Charles Keil (1994) argued persuasively that musical meaning is formed through participation in musical events, and not in the text or score. Christopher Small (1977) waxed poetic about a world where the distinction between musician and non-musician no longer existed, and Jacques Attali imagined a world of “composition”—expanded out from avant-garde jazz—where the means of creativity inhered in each person (1985, 135).
Yet that same rhetoric works differently today.4 Active participation is now a privileged mode of consumerism. As Jodi Dean has written, “our deepest commitments—to inclusion, equality and participation within a public—bind us to practices whereby we submit to global capital” (Dean 2002, 151). Contemporary media beg for and sometimes demand active participation. They ask their users to intertwine them with as many parts of their lives as possible. It is not just so-called social media (a misnomer if there ever was one—since all media are by definition social). Magazines and newspapers implore us to write back and explore on multiple platforms. TV shows ask us to go online and participate in discussions and games, books get their own Facebook pages where readers are asked to “like” them, software companies put together “street teams” of users willing to promote them in a manner analogous to what concert promoters used to do.
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The demand to participate can become coercive, exhausting the very collective faculties it officially celebrates. While interactivity can be imagined as the “like” or “retweet,” it also encompasses the “agree to terms” button. The supposedly democratic call to dialogue and participation can turn sour when people have good reasons and desires to retreat.
Host Adam Savage of Mythbusters tells how Visa, Mastercard, and Discover had the Discovery Channel put the kibosh on an episode that would have revealed just how “trackable and hackable” the RFID chips found in many credit cards are. It’s a telling example of how corporate advertisers serve as the gatekeepers of mainstream media/entertainment:
"When I stumble on old Star Trek re-runs while channel-surfing, I experience the show as a flickery palimpsest, in media archaeology terms. Meaning: I see the characters -- Spock especially -- through layers of memory and personal meaning. I watch it partly through the eyes of the kid I was when I first tuned in to the show back in the '60s. I think of the episodes where the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock wrestles with his irrational, emotional human side (his Inner Feminine, in '60s terms), episodes that taught me lessons about another, more fluid masculinity, cerebral yet strong, sensitive yet drily funny, at a time when every dad I knew was a blustering, because-I-said-so Authority Figure.
Listening to the jagged, atonal music of my parents' arguments late at night, when they thought I'd fallen asleep -- the inevitable drawn-out prelude to the inevitable divorce -- I clung to Spock's fundamentalist faith in reason, fervently trying to believe that an arched eyebrow and a Puckish aloofness could be my heat shield against the firefight on the other side of my bedroom wall.
Like Obama, I believe in the final frontier. But like Prince Keon, I believe it's inside us."
"The mid-1970s...you were patiently waiting for Space:1999 to return for its second year when a beguiling sci-fi series shuffled onto your screens, regional ITV scheduling permitting, for a brief thirteen weeks and then sloped off apologetically to disappear forever. Maybe you're here because you just vaguely believe you may have dreamt about a planet ruled by women dressed in platform boots (and perhaps you did - that's your own business), or maybe because you're a 'fan' infuriated by the lack of hard and fast info around on this series. Maybe you're just hoping to find pictures of Judy Geeson dressed as a space lady. Whatever brings you here - you're in luck. This site intends to bring you everything you ever wanted to know about Star Maidens but were afraid to ask."
"Long before "Survivor," the eccentric who created "The Gong Show" discovered that people will do anything to get on TV, and others will watch them."
Clips of the Doctor Who theme over time.
If you are a true science fiction fan then you will agree there is nothing more superior to this genre of books, games, movies, television shows and so much more. It is within the realm of science fiction you can expand your mind beyond the confines of reality and dive deep into the worlds of creativity and fantasy. Our goal is to do just that; dive deep into the world of science fiction on all levels.
"“Do clever people care about the X Factor?” asks Matthew Taylor.
Yes - by definition. The X Factor final got 17 million viewers. Any clever person must be curious about such a significant social phenomenon. "
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But then, wasn’t this always so? The fact is that pop music - be the lies of John Lennon or the truth of Johnny Rotten - never did change the world, and was only ever a commodity surrounded by romantic illusion.
In all this, I suspect, lies the reason why so many affect to dislike the X Factor. They’re shooting the messenger. The X Factor draws attention to some truths we’d rather not know.
"Christmas is watched on television at least as much as it actually lived, if not more. "
Julia Child and television cooking.
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Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.
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For Lévi-Strauss, cooking is a metaphor for the human transformation of nature into culture, but in the years since “The Raw and the Cooked,” other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the idea that cooking is the key to our humanity. Earlier this year, Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, published a fascinating book called “Catching Fire,” in which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors — not tool-making or language or meat-eating — that made us human.
Welcome To TV Tropes!
What is this about? This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart's content.
In a way, the Susan Boyle story is a reminder that liberalism actually has heartfelt, emotionally rich stories that are intimately familiar to many people in many societies. Chief among them is the insistence that individuals contain within them talents, character, particularities which are poorly described by stereotypes or collective identities and poorly managed or appreciated by social institutions and conventions.
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