I didn’t mean to suggest it was unthinking. A lot of smart people make a living trashing popular things in smart, even funny, ways. I just think that it’s a profession that is going to lead to some criticism.
Alstein
1748
The Alt-right also tries to cancel folks, they just haven’t been that successful after the days of the Dixie Chicks.
I’d say Lindsay Ellis actually got popular once she stopped trashing popular things and instead started really critiquing and examine popular media in an academic way. For example, her series on The Transformers movies and how the scripts are written versus filmed or her long discussions about Disney movies and Death of the Author. Heck, she even got a partnership with PBS to discuss literature. She’s not a Cinemasins or RLM by any means.
No doubt Lindsey and others who’ve been relentlessly harassed feel your distinction is an important one. Let’s ask Etika what he thinks-oh wait…
Well, ‘harassed’ is a fine word. It fits. Use it.
Enidigm
1752
That’s true, and also probably why this recent criticism seemed to sting her so much, because at the root of it was accusing her of a fundamental criticial misunderstanding of the thing she was commenting on, which to someone who takes their work seriously and approaches it more intellectually is a much harder thing to get over.
CraigM
1753
Bingo. She has done some fantastic stuff. She has done some of the most in depth looks at Michael Bay’s style and even makes the case for him as an auteur based on a very in depth look at his work. And it makes sense! He reasonably is, because his work has such a strong identity and style. Its just a nihilistic, ugly, quick cut style that is not critically praised because it isn’t beautiful. But he is as much an auteur as Tarrantino, Anderson, Malick and others. It is just his style doesn’t appeal to cinephiles.
Matt_W
1754
Tell that to Anita Sarkeesian, Jen McCreight and Rebecca Watson.
Telefrog
1755
Take her video on Bright for example. Yeah, there’s some glee in the trashing of such a terrible movie, but once she gets that out of her system, the video is a thoughtful discussion of stereotyping and how Bright’s script falls into the trap of using fantasy races as stand-ins for racist tropes. It’s well beyond a goofy Pitch Meeting video. She’s really educating here and not just going for low-hanging fruit.
The quality of her videos like this is what got her the PBS gig. Anyone dismissing Ellis as just another YouTube trash critic is being disingenuous or just hasn’t really seen her work.
Houngan
1756
But there’s also the sociological theory of mob mentality. I’m not sure if it’s Emergent Norm Theory or some other subset, but (and I wish I could find it again) an article I read years ago really rang a bell with me. You take a group of people and they will exist on a curve of behavior; there may be one person who is the basest, and that person is willing to throw a rock through a store window and steal a TV at the drop of a hat. That person is rare, everyone else is probably in the fat part of the curve where there is a certain respect for standard norms but also a threshold where they will act the same way, provided enough examples have been given to show it as a viable option. Then there’s the far right tail where you have people who would never, ever do anything like that regardless of circumstance.
So real world, you have a mob or a protest or a blackout or whatever, you have Johnny no-rocks that just says “fuck it” and throws the rock and steals something. Then you have the one-rocks that see Johnny and figure “well, one rock has been thrown, I now feel comfortable throwing a rock and stealing, though I would never do that in a normal situation.” That sets off the two-rocks that set off the three-rocks, and suddenly you have a situation where the fat part of the curve has hit its rock limit and participates in actions that they would have thought completely foreign a day ago.
The mob responds to both the idea of reward and the perception of risk, and when you have someone getting dogpiled by the quickest actors there’s always a reduction of risk, because inherently if a hundred people do a slightly bad thing, then everyone understands that the same hundred are too many to be appropriately punished. Tune it back from theft and rioting to being horrible to another person in whatever remove, and you get the wilting flowers suddenly going in for kicks to the ribs.
Yes. Agree. I’d go further: people are basically bad.
Houngan
1758
Counterpoint: People are basically animals.
Houngan
1760
The Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Mohiam says, “definitely.”
Matt_W
1761
I don’t know what to say about this. The solution isn’t to police speech in online spaces. The solution isn’t to abandon attempts to be empathetic to marginalized people. I think maybe some recognition that online culture, in general, could stand to be more gentle is a good thing, but I’m not sure how you cultivate that. I think calling out mobs for groupthink and speaking out against harassment is a good thing. There’s certainly a way that nuance is crowded out in all public spaces in favor of snap judgements, boundary policing, and tribe signifying.
I don’t think this is true. Most people behave in socially acceptable ways most of the time, particularly in person. I think we have a strong desire to place ourselves in relationship to each other and to social hierarchies, to belong in some sense. We are strongly motivated to not be lonely. Social media basically obscures all the parts of interaction that lead to social cohesion–body language, proximity, non-anonymity, relationship–and reifies tribe signifiers that have nothing to do with your physical social location (by which I mean things like family, IRL friends, geography, work/school/routine, religious meetings, etc.) It’s a recipe for mass sociopathy.
Alstein
1762
This is why I curate my most personal spaces for online stuff pretty heavily, and avoid folks who are angry all the time. Politics does slip though, and it should, and I insist on some shared values, but I try to avoid really negative folks.
Except, if you’re right, it isn’t. If people behave differently on social media than they do in person, then the ‘mass sociopathy’ is confined to a digital medium that anyone can walk away from, and in which violence can’t occur. It still means they’re being assholes, and they should be criticized for being assholes, and nobody should tolerate their assholery quietly; but it isn’t going to lead to violence in the streets, because it doesn’t happen in the streets.
On the other hand, my own personal experience of people is that they are quite a bit like they are on social media, and all it takes for them to become actually bad in person is an environment where they feel safe to act out: for example, in a crowd that is just like them, where they feel protected by numbers and the anonymity of a crowd.
Thrag
1764
People are people, so why should it be that stans and critics get along so awfully?
Matt_W
1765
Well consider that social media is like that crowd all of the time. I guess that’s my point. I don’t think people are intrinsically “bad” or “good”; I think behaviors are bad or good, which are labels we attach to behaviors that fit within social norms.
