Media Escapism
What's your favorite show?
This is one particular rant that will end up being more hypocritical than usual. The reason being? I certainly love my entertainment. I love my distractions. Give me circuses, give me streaming, give me streaming circuses.
What am I on about this time?
Let's start with a question. What are the people in your life most passionate about? What causes the most arguments between friends? What about online strangers? Online friends?
The obvious answer is the big "P," politics. The elected officials we love to hate. The talking heads, the Twitter pundits, and everyone in between. But what about people who don't argue about politics?
Keep in mind that personal anecdotal evidence serves only to illuminate audiences about why an author has adopted a certain point of view.
With that said, in my personal experience, when people online aren't talking about politics, they're most often talking about media. The big M. Or maybe it's the big C ("content," a word I despise. Content means "something contained." So a content creator is someone who creates things which are contained??? Just say "YouTube mook.")
Okay, let's get back on track. Media, let's call it entertainment media, dominates much of what people talk, and apparently think about. Why? For one, it's easier to talk about why you think Jon Snow should have been king than it is to talk about how the world is burning down in various ways. The real world is scary. Fake worlds are scary, but imaginary at least.
When you see two people arguing about Star Wars with the same ferocity as two people arguing about, say, abortion, things start to get pretty weird.
Of course, stories have always enthralled us. Stories are a foundation of human society, in my opinion. Plus, it's a decades-old joke that Star Wars fans care more about on-screen depictions of an imagined universe than they do about what's occurring in the world around them. However, as "nerd culture" has gone mainstream, "ostriching" yourself with media has also become commonplace.
Why worry about global warming when you can just watch the new Avengers movie? (Okay, I know the Avengers movies are like, done, I think? Not the point.) Why even give a thought to who your elected official is, when it's much easier to just stream the latest episode of the new Disney Plus show everyone is raving about, or download that game you've been waiting to pick up?
We're so far beyond bread and circuses at this point, that it's hard to even think of an analogy. Big Macs and Superbowls? No, not that. But something better. Let me know if you think of one.
Anyway, with many people I encounter, I sometimes wonder if they care more about what happens in a fictional universe than what happens in our own. It's part of the unique millennial nihilism which can be thought of as an apathy, a feeling of overwhelming dread, and an acute awareness of everything wrong with the world, to the point where tragic events are ingested, ignored, shoved down, and buried.
It's all too much, a little bit of everything all of the time.
Climate change. Global famine. Superbugs. Fascist dictators. Mass shootings. These are scary things. So we wrap ourselves up in stories. We insulate ourselves form things that can hurt us by immersing ourselves in fantasy worlds. There are no guns here, we have magic wands.
Like I said at the beginning of this rant, I'm guilty. I watch my fair share of TV (though I'm more of a rerun guy). I play video games. I even play tabletop RPGs, perhaps the ultimate escape (pretending to be someone else, somewhere else).
I'd like to think that because I doom scroll a few hours a week, that I have some informed view of the world. But what does awareness mean if I don't do a damned thing about it? It's easier to dive into my favorite media and forget the outside world for a while.
"Camera's got them images, camera's got them all, nothing's shocking."
- Ted Just Admit It, Jane's Addiction.
My generation is practically powerless, buried in problems, and numb to news that would have shaken anyone not totally numb to the 24 hour news cycle. There's almost nothing anyone can actually do about it. So, why shouldn't we argue about whether Jon Snow should have been king? He was the last living Targaryen, king of the wildlings, the only man capable of uniting the people of Westeros. Not to mention a championed warrior. Despite being neutered in season 8, he was still the best man for the job. Bran would have been a great librarian or court mage. Instead we got like the stupidest possible ending that had little to no weight to it whatsoever, leaving the entire series with a build up to absolutely nothing? Not to mention the various dropped threads and forgotten plotlines and brok...