I Could Be Your Hero, Baby

I’m up to my ears in research paper-writing, so this will be quick and probably very scattered, but this article from Newsweek brought up several interesting points, I thought. 

First of all, I really like Rachel Maddow and watch her show whenever I can–she may represent a younger generation, as the article implies, but not in the annoying way that that description so often hints at. She’s not self-impressed, she’s not too over the top. She’s really intelligent, quick on her feet, and just really warm and engaging, but not in a way that allows her guests to walk all over her. I still find it somehow strangely thrilling to watch Maddow, who, as the article states is a self-described “butch dyke” having a friendly, respectful back and forth with crotchety old Pat Buchanan, the man who once tried to get a New York Gay Pride Parade canceled and wrote in a syndicated column that women are “”simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.” Of course I know that they are both civilized adults and it’s not exactly Nobel Prize worthy for them to be able to hold a conversation. But they seem to genuinely like each other and whenever I catch them bantering back and forth, I can’t help it…it warms my cold, cold heart a little bit.

Anyway, the first interesting thing that the Newsweek article mentioned was the question: “how does a liberal, left-leaning “Rachel Maddow Show” behave when a left-leaning president is elected?” I am sure MSNBC and Rachel Maddow with it will be just fine. But, it is sort of an interesting and somewhat unfortunate consequence of having a two-party system that whenever one party is in power, the opposition party strengthens and with it the media that are more closely aligned with that party. The Republicans have proven particularly adept at exacerbating this phenomenon, with such fallacious constructions as “liberal media bias.” One of the most fascinating books I’ve read in the past few years was “Blinded By the Right,” David Brock’s sociopolitical autobiography about his decades spent toiling for the far right media machine and his political conversion (spurred, interestingly, by his research for a would-be smear book on Hillary Clinton…long story short, he ended up kind of liking her). Anyway, the book is really fascinating in its belly-of-the-beast perspective of the world of conservative journalism and politics in the 1980s and 90s and one of the things he talks about is the rhetoric which is so skillfully employed by the right. This idea of a liberal bias in the media is one specific example he discusses, but more on that another time.

The other thing that struck me about the Rachel Maddow article was her assertion that she has no idols, no heroes. She says that “If you’re 35, you don’t have heroes. Watergate and Vietnam sort of killed heroism.” It’s interesting to hear that because I actually think that my generation, which is less than one generation behind Maddows, is pathologically obsessed with heroes and heroism to the point that I think we’ve forgotten what that word means. If 35 year olds had Watergate and Vietnam, my generation has, well, for starters more or less everything about the Reagan administration and the Gulf War, if you keep going to the young kids today, they have 9/11, Iraq…but for my generation and the next, we haven’t abandoned heroism, we cling to it–we seek it out, desperately.  I say “we” slightly disingenuously. The whole “heroism” thing makes me a bit uncomfortable. The word is so liberally applied that its meaning has been more or less obliterated. One reason I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch the show “Heroes” (even though I love Kristen Bell) is because the show is not about heroes–it’s about superheroes, and that is not the same thing, and I find calling the show “Heroes” misleading and annoying. Maybe this is a personal pet peeve, but I think there’s something about the coverage of “heroes” that doesn’t make sense. A fundamental part of “heroism” has always been doing something incredibly selfless and not seeking any recognition for it. And I think the second part of that description is very important. If Peter Parker had gone around in the streets being like “guess what I did last night!” and then gone on Oprah to cry it out in front of a studio audience, he wouldn’t have been a hero. He would have been a jerk with special powers. So, when I see “heroes” who do something legitimately amazing and then go around on the talk show circuit and rehash the story a hundred times, it sort of cheapens the whole thing, makes a spectacle out of something which should have been a private moment of human triumph, bravery, connection, love, or whatever. Interestingly, I now find myself back to that idea of the media and modern narcissism I was talking about the other day. In fact, I think Montana Miller’s words are completely apropos in this context as well–”If it’s not recorded or documented, then it doesn’t even seem worthwhile. For today’s generation, it might seem, ‘what’s the point of doing it if everyone isn’t going to see it?’”

Quick Follow Up

Jezebel has a really thoughtful, interesting write-up of the teen’s webcam suicide I wrote about yesterday (“Virtual In-Vanity“). The Jezebel piece focuses more on the the mentality of the online audience, but also touches on some of the themes of exhibitionism and performativity of actors in the online world as well, writing “There is a loneliness and a patheticism that comes with such a thing; for every person trying to be an internet star, there are five or six just trying to be noticed by somebody, anybody at all.” The piece goes on to quote Montana Miller, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University, who talks about the “generational desire to live in the most public way possible,” saying “If it’s not recorded or documented then it doesn’t even seem worthwhile. For today’s generation it might seem, `What’s the point of doing it if everyone isn’t going to see it?’”

Virtual In-Vanity

This heartbreaking and very disturbing story on CNN about a Florida teenager who committed suicide on his live webcam while viewers egged him on and chatted back and forth about whether he would succeed got me thinking about the ways the internet has changed and continues to change reality and human interaction. My first reaction, besides revulsion, was that there seems to be something strangely antithetical about committing suicide in such a public, dialogic forum. Suicide seems to me the ultimate act of hopelessness, of isolation and disconnection, from other people and from the world around you. I think it’s a fascinating commentary on our mediated world that, even in death, the only thing that, as the saying goes, everyone does alone, this poor kid’s behavior demonstrated the kind of performative, outwardly-focused presentational awareness, a narcissism of sorts that characterizes so much of online social interaction.

I was talking to a friend yesterday who is working on a project dealing with Myspace, specifically Myspace comments (the messages Myspace “friends” leave each other on their profile walls) as an exemplification of this same sort of online narcissism, and it reminded me of this story, which I’d just read. I’ve never used Myspace, but have been on Facebook for years and I’ve seen this mutual narcissism/voyeurism steadily growing within that space. In the relatively early days of Facebook when I first joined, users had only the comparatively limited forum of the Facebook profile to personalize with such information as your dating status, home town, religious beliefs, favorite music, and an open-ended blurb called “about me”. At the time I remember being a little embarrassed to post such things as my political views and favorite activities for all to see. Part of me enjoyed being able to craft an image for myself, to see some kind of a skeletal, one-dimensional version of me cohesively represented in a little box–neat, clean, definite, and much simpler and more easily digestible than the three-dimensional reality of my life. Especially as a somewhat shy, reserved person, I think I relished the chance to let the profile represent me to people better than I felt I might be able to. At the same time, I did feel a vague sense of embarrassment, the same embarrassment, in fact, that kept me from starting a blog for years–the feeling that there was something incredibly presumptuous in assuming that anyone would want to hear what I thought or know a bunch of random information about me.

Over the years, I’ve had that feeling again and again as Facebook has become more pervasive, providing an ever greater variety of  ways to exhibit one’s self publicly–photo albums and video, all kinds of “applications” which let you, for instance, display a map showing everywhere in the world you’ve been or a little box that shows your friends what music you’re listening to at that very minute. Most recently came the “news feed”, a somewhat creepy feature which aids and abets the stalker in all of us by showing us a running list of all of our friends’ most recent facebook actions–who just changed their “relationship status”, who wrote on whose wall, who became friends with whom, etc. At the same time, Facebook also added the “status message” feature which allows users to post a short message, which informs their “friends” of their current whereabouts, feelings, or plans. It took me a long time to come around to the status message. Something about writing into a window which forced me to discuss myself in the third person was just too much for me. But, even that has come to seem much more normal to me and I will probably even put the link to this post up in my status message after I finish writing. At least in my personal experience and observation, it seems to me that the internet continues to facilitate ever-greater potential for narcissism and self-display. Other forms of media certainly encode these values as well, but I think it is the internet’s participatory and productive elements that reify messages by allowing individuals who were primarily consumers of these values previously to become producers and reproducers of them as well.