Say I provide an exhaustive list of everything I’ve ever done wrong concerning writing or communicating. I grant I often come across blunt, mean, or rough. I concede that rambling drunk is rather disjointed and violently weird. I appreciate that my experience or knowledge about something can go over some heads. I’m deeply aware that many people are simply pretending to care and trying to look passable. I’m often prompted to unpack a superficially confusing metaphor. I know I get provoked and derail conversations in a cut off my nose to spite my face fashion.
What if you spend so much time conceding that you never manage to say anything?
One of the reasons I like data is that by itself it isn’t emotional. It cuts both ways though. You’ll respond to a starving child ad with a mini biography in a way you won’t to “x amount of civilians killed in airstrike.” At their base, the same cold message is attempting to get out. People are needlessly suffering or dying. One plays on guilt to provoke you to help. One gets regarded as a matter-of-fact sentiment about seemingly necessary and endless conflict.
Something that persistently bugs me are true and honest attempts at saying something which must be couched in a greater absurdity. “That Kendrick Lamar Grammy performance was powerful,” says every rich white person the next day after over-reading the room. You attend the party of millionaires patting each other on the back for working in an incidentally infectious industry to get deeply moved by the powerful statement regarding black lives and society. Praise be they have Saint Kendrick to absolve them of their day to day by giving them something real to talk about in sound bites for a few days.
And think about all the messages that supports. It suggests an audience, an, is important regardless of how they’ll treat the work. It’s a symbiotic pursuit of legitimacy and value. If he performed it on the street, then we might get a pass thinking this one is a little overzealous for his cause. But for the value and tradition of celebrity he gets due regard. It teaches us to seek out the same stages quick to usher him off for the next award category. It suggests this is the most popular, the most effective, and the source of the most legitimate value one could aspire to. Because it owns the cameras.
I think it’s pertinent at this point to think of the irony of Youtube. I’m still in an uncomfortable place when I see how turning the camera on yourself and going about your day can garner millions of followers. I view entertainment, generally, as a form of escape. I view it as escape first, genuine appreciation second, if that ever happens. That millions of people want to see what you eat, what you’re packing for vacation, or what you’re wearing truly scares the shit out of me. I don’t think it’s a discussion about tastes and preferences. I think it speaks to what’s fundamentally going to constitute being human.
When you have the lens, you’re showing people what they’re not. They’re not popular for their quirks or jokes. They’re not getting endorsement deals. They’re not able to forget about and ignore the haters. They’re not going on your vacation or dancing in your music video or have 5 friends to make gay jokes while streaming a Pokemon game. You’re granting licence to that escape. And that, in and of itself, I don’t think is the problem.
What gets to me is the conversation that follows in trying to justify it all. “Hey, people are choosing to watch me or pay for my book.” “I’m providing content.” “People are opening up and sharing with me in a way they can’t with anyone else.” “I’m just doing me, what’s wrong with that?” We live in a world where turning on your webcam and being loud or obnoxious gets referred to as “content” with the same attitude and bravado a network executive might refer to a million dollar investment in a TV show. The equating and all-inclusive message, “what matters is that they’re watching.”
We remain blind to reciprocity. We remain ignorant of history. We stop stunted as the noises and funny pictures curtail exploration and follow-up.
Our mediums are evolving and overlapping and accelerating in their capacity for message transmission. We still barely know how to talk to each other.
I think we don’t know how to talk to each other because we don’t talk to ourselves. We don’t ask and truly consider just how big racial issues are. We don’t think what happens to the person talking to the Youtube star about their depression 2 weeks later. We don’t ask who’s pulling strings behind what’s allowed for a “mainstream audience.” And nothing about what we’re watching is going to suggest that we do.
Here I’d like to move over to what happens if and when we do manage to talk.
Consider our classic education system. I remember the boring quasi-discussions in philosophy classes as most pretended to understand the material. The challenge is to talk long enough to get a participation grade, not necessarily say anything of value.
Or think about when someone is brave, it literally takes bravery in our culture to speak if that isn’t sobering enough, but opens their mouth nonetheless to question something. If comment sections are to be believed, they’re immediately attacked or inanely questioned for their motives or capacity. Did they have a legitimate question? That was never a question the masses were willing to entertain before they went in.
Ideally, you find someone presumably knowledgeable and enthusiastic to talk. Now you have to navigate personality and style. This 1/100 shot at something mutually helpful and informative becomes a high stakes game regarding legitimacy as neither of you chose to engage because you think you’re wrong. As far as my experience goes, I think I’m only wrong with almost helpless words to barely scratch at what I mean, but I’m rarely met with mutual deference to humility.
Ding! Fight’s on.You make an analogy that’s a one to one wording of something they’ve said. They immediately tell you to drop your analogy and it doesn’t connect with them but refrain from addressing why you used it. What makes the analogy wrong? They don’t like it. Why did you think to employ it the way you did? Oh come now, they’ve moved so far onto what they insist needs to be said, why are we still asking?
They employ “what everyone knows” regarding how a particular institution is really supposed to operate, and pepper that explanation with aspects they assure you they don’t like, but are the reality nonetheless. You concede that such an explanation goes down easy or is what we classically entertain as a function of our cultural narrative. Attempting to move beyond that and describe forces that betray convention now serves as a jab to pull them away from their comfort zone.
Now time to duck the incoming hay-maker. You see, anything can have any number of things that shape it, so aren’t you just being too philosophical and nonspecific and therefore basically wrong with nothing meaningful to say about the real world?
Here you’re sort of stuck. You’re under the impression that this person was willing to talk. When you quote back to them their language trying to better understand, you’re denied. When you try to enlarge the scope, not dismiss the circumstances or details, but allow for context, you’re dismissed. You’re pressed to meet them at their level, which to you feels like it often isn’t saying enough or enough accurately, or “agree to disagree” about points you don’t think were ever even established.
This is just what happens when it goes “well.” Ignore what happens when you’re rushed or trying to be “polite.” Ignore underlying emotions that provoke any number of conflicting responses and contradictions. Ignore the inherent difficulty at arriving at the proper words or unpacking an analogy before regarding it as summarily useless. Forget how quickly small becomes big or that nothing exists in a vacuum. Consider yourself lucky if you’re not forced to navigate condescension, name calling, and numerous left-field assertions attempting to turn the duel into a battle royale.
It’s in holding an idea and following it that matters. Just saying it means nothing. “Just do it” is an empty slogan. You have to acknowledge your agency, for all of its dramatic pitfalls, before you can obtain the capacity to acknowledge where someone else is coming from. The suffocating superficiality of our lives that swarms around the popular, familiar, or addicting seems at the heart of miscommunication.
Ego gets in the way. Insecurity turns you deaf and blind. Selfishness begets denial and excuses. You would like to pretend you’re not one of us. You think you didn’t come from a place of more consequence than your reported cleaned up short-cutted biography would have us believe. Your explanations must resonate absolute while our infantile babbling should refrain from offending.
Whatever you want to call it, however you believe you feel about it, whatever you think you know, just remember, you’re wrong. When you refuse to accept and pursue how wrong, you’re not just bound to repeat history, but rob people of the chance to better understand and shape their own. If you don’t learn what needs to be said as opposed to what’s popular or keeps people “happy,” you reduce yourself to an empty talking box of “content” to be digested like excess carbs on an overflowing dessert tray.
It’s not wrong to indulge. It’s not wrong to escape. It’s not flatly meaningless to create anything. It’s wrong to ignore consequences. It’s wrong to deny responsibility. It’s wrong to pretend like you shape the environment and it doesn’t shape you.
