![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A spectator society
A friend and I were talking asynchronously the other day**, and she put forward this interesting idea:
What do people think? More than an agree or disagree, what questions does the question raise for you, or what roads does it take your thoughts down?
For me, it got me thinking about the difference between something being effortful and something being miserable. Building something strong takes effort, and effort, by definition, involves work, which isn't always fun. But that's by no means the same as misery. You can rightly want to avoid misery, but I think you're likely to be disappointed in life if you try to avoid effort. ---But that's just one tangent. What does the question raise for you?
**"talking asynchronously" is my new way of saying "exchanging letters."
A thought: we've become a spectator society, where people often watch sports or plays rather than participating themselves. Are we also becoming a society where many people watch social relationships (on TV, the internet, etc.) rather than participating?
What do people think? More than an agree or disagree, what questions does the question raise for you, or what roads does it take your thoughts down?
For me, it got me thinking about the difference between something being effortful and something being miserable. Building something strong takes effort, and effort, by definition, involves work, which isn't always fun. But that's by no means the same as misery. You can rightly want to avoid misery, but I think you're likely to be disappointed in life if you try to avoid effort. ---But that's just one tangent. What does the question raise for you?
**"talking asynchronously" is my new way of saying "exchanging letters."
no subject
And then you have a long period of penny dreadfuls and public hangings and murder ballads and soap operas, all designed to appeal to the base instincts of the audience, and people discussing the lives of Bobby and Sue Ellen. the major shift in my lifetime is that we more and more treat not only celebrities, but ordinary people (who blog, have Youtube channels) as protagonists in a soap opera. The less interactive social media become, the more people use them to talk down from a platform at the masses, the more they become 'celebrities' in their own right and their movements are dissected by an every-hungry audience.
And then I remember how in Jane Austen's time, everyone was sitting around the fire while one person read out the letters about What Our Edith Did Last Month In Brighton and I wonder whether this hasn't always been a part of humanity, only for a short time we focused mostly on fictional characters and we're coming full circle again.
no subject
And I guess now, as in the past, while we listen to the gossip of the public ordinary lives (e.g., the Youtubers, the influencers), a lot of people also want to *be* those people. Kids want to be influencers--i.e., they want to have others spectate them.