This story popped up in my timeline today. The story has been on the fringes of, well, everything else that's going on in our country/world, so not a lot of bandwidth is expended on it--at least, not in my circles. But the denials of Zuckerberg (and tech companies more broadly) about the way their platforms impact people's lives seem, at most, disingenuous and, at worst, devastatingly detrimental.
Here's my biggest beef with Zuckerberg's denials about Russian interference on Facebook: The entire purpose of advertising is to sway people. Whether it be something comparatively innocuous or desperately malevolent, advertisements are created to manipulate impulse and thoughts of those who read. (The strongest defense that I've seen against this, by the way, is deconstructivism, but the rigors of that theory can be difficult even in the simplest modes, to say nothing of the fact that deconstruction has been co-opted by the very thing it critiqued: Language.) We dress up this manipulation with benign words (which is, of course, it's own form of manipulation), calling them "brands" (as if the word branded doesn't stem from physically burning one's mark on an object or, in the case of livestock, animals) or "products" or "services". But the point is always the same: Using language to trick, cajole, coerce, or convince a person to think or behave differently than she was planning to before encountering the ad. Facebook's unparalleled success comes not from anything specific to the site, at least, not anymore. Communicating with others, sharing articles or ideas--there were plenty of other places online to do that before Facebook came out. Generating social connections, however, is not how Facebook survived. It was because people were there, so advertisers wanted a chance to "talk" to people where they were. Facebook exists as an advertisement hub--that people do other things there is happenstance. Without that ad revenue, Facebook wouldn't be able to have the numbers of users (as the article I linked pointed out, about 70% of America's social media happens on Facebook) that would support it were it not "free". And a subscription-based Facebook would likely fail, considering the way that we view what ought to be online. In fact, now that I've finished my time with quidditch, I visit Facebook about once a day: To upload a link to these essays. While I have a few hundred followers on Twitter, my analytics say that I get almost no traffic from that social media platform. It's almost exclusively through Facebook that anyone comes here. Though I'm not peddling anything for wares, I'm exchanging on ideas, and so I use the platform that has the people. This is why I think Zuckerberg is, to put it baldly, full of crap. He knows that advertisements sway people, and the fact that he was so cavalier about that during the election of 2016 shows the blindness our society puts on advertising in general. Our economy is awash in advertising dollars, which we only do because we know it works. Lies are always peddled during an election, but there were utter fabrications that circulated, unchecked, through the poorly regulated veins of Facebook's body. And, more than that, they were funded by foreign agents with the intent to subvert people's thinking and change their thoughts about the election. Facebook has, essentially, allowed Russians to have a say in an American election. That's the reality of it. That Zuckerberg and his ilk, who are now some of the richest people on the planet, deny that their business model could be used nefariously is insulting. When it comes to "free" platforms (this one included), it's important to remember that it's being paid for. It's so the advertisers can see you...not the other way around. For the last decade, I've taught, at minimum, one semester of Creative Writing a year. One year, I taught two courses in the same semester. So I've spent a lot of time teaching students how to write creatively, as opposed to their other English classes, where I teach them how to write non-fiction, informative writings. And every year, I try to refine the experience. I want the class to be light-hearted, fun, and relaxing--a break from the day-t0-day stresses of being a student at a college preparatory school.
As a general rule, I try to prepare lessons that I think the students will enjoy and that will help them. Today, however, didn't really land in that arena. We're in the midst of a world-building unit in which I ask that they develop a map of their new world, and create different things: Governments, religions, languages, magic/technology systems, and more are all part of what they can work on. Due to me being a [fill in the blank] teacher, I wasn't particularly interested in teaching the lesson today. We took care of some housekeeping, then moved into a writing day, in which I let them do what they needed to in order to create some of their new worlds. I took the time to finish outlining my horror book. Now that I'm done outlining it, I don't know if I want to write it. This isn't the first time that I've done that. I have a grimdark fantasy sitting in outline form--something enormous and filled with death and battling gods--as well as the original build of a dinosaur-based book. There are, as I've mentioned here on the website, a number of potential books in me, including sequels, and they're all at sundry levels of abandonment. The thing is, I keep trying to grow my storytelling diet, and then I want to write in that mode, too. For example, I was watching One Punch Man last night, and I thought it would be fun to play with superhero tropes the way that anime deconstructs the superhero genre. Then I remembered that Brandon Sanderson did a similar thing with his Steelheart series (which I haven't read) and maybe I don't really want to do that. Except I do--which is why I'm in the midst of thinking about writing a comic--so it's a real impulse that I entertain and then dismiss. Even today, after finishing my monster horror book, I read an article about Silent Hill, and I thought maybe I'd prefer to do a horror story that's a ghost story instead. And I still want to write a science-fiction book, to say nothing of finishing all of my other projects that require extensive editing and rewriting. With November coming up, I have to decide if I'm going to write for NaNoWriMo again (I want to, though I don't know what I'll write...maybe the ghost story?), which will be another random thing. My first NaNoWriMo was a retelling of Dante's Inferno, so I could pick that up as another quick one (I have it lightly outlined, because I have tons of stuff outlined), or I could do one of the other retellings that I have in mind--the Paradise Lost one would be really cool, I think. So it's tricky. I have (very) limited time to write any stories at all, and I want to write what I'm passionate about, but I feel like I have ADHD when it comes to getting anything down. Maybe I'm feeling frustrated because I spent the better part of two hours making dinner and it ended up being rubbish, and now I'm worried that all I ever do is create rubbish, and the world is turning to rubbish and I guess this is good night. Bleck. Note: Welcome to the first of my regular essays here on my website. I hope you enjoy!
Over the last year or so, I've striven to watch more TV and movies. This may sound a touch strange, since a lot of advice out there urges you to, y'know...not watch as much TV or as many movies. I mean, I'm not touching the national average of five hours (and change) of TV a day that is consumed in America. Even if you allow that I'm "watching a movie" when I'm showing segments of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet to my class, that adds about one hour of TV time to my day--and that's only during September. I squeeze in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half during the evenings, though very often that's in the form of video games. And, despite having more time to myself (comparatively) on the weekends, I don't find myself watching a lot of television during that time, either. It took two days just to watch The Dark Knight Rises this past week. So, while I'm saying that I'm trying to watch more TV and films, that isn't to say that I'm even approaching what a "typical" American consumes. Instead, however, I'm trying to look at these similar--yet different--forms of entertainment as a writer, picking apart what does and doesn't work in a piece. I'm becoming more aware of film-centric critiques--editing, for example, is becoming more visible to me--and trying to think of how the compressed stories that I'm watching on screen could translate to written long-form. In fact, I think this may be part of why I'm interested in seeing the film version of It. Aside from the fact that I enjoyed that book much more than I expected, I'm really curious to see how they took the elements of the novel and adapted them. And while I know there are plenty of articles articulating those differences, I'm curious to see if I can do as much myself, without others guiding my thoughts. The downside is I'd have to watch It, and I'm not much of a horror guy. So, that's a bit of a conundrum. Anyway, the fact that I'm trying to immerse myself in these alternative modes of storytelling is because of the aforementioned compression. What story elements are compelling regardless of their medium? How can I improve my writing by sitting and watching? How can character motivation be conveyed, particularly when the benefit of internal monologue isn't a viable option? What can I emulate on the page from what I see on the screen when non-diegetic shortcuts and atmospheric contributions are rendered moot? How can I create strong emotion in readers when we're so much more accustomed to connecting our emotions as viewers? As I'm exposing myself to more of the stories that move me, I hope that movies will help me make more moving stories, too. |
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July 2022
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