LouieG, an entertaining exposition. However:
This is exactly 100% wrong. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is and is not of value and interest and where to direct one's attention.
The examples of videos that are listed here -- things like the Baghdad airstrike or the Sandusky case -- are in fact the ones that are guaranteed to be of no value whatsoever, precisely because of their ostensible "larger significance" and "implications" for society and so forth.
To attend to such objects is to drown in a sea of platitudes and received opinion. Everyone's reaction to them will be sorted in accordance to their social and political "commitments" and the whole thing will be entirely unrewarding of attention. There is nothing to see there beyond pious ceremonies of performatively correct response of various kinds that are bizarrely evacuated of all content.
By contrast, your humble creation of xoBang had at least a shot at being somewhat interesting, entertaining, and rewarding of attention, precisely because it was created by yourself and a buddy as a throwaway on a random night with the sole aim of getting a rise out of some internet feminists. That gives it a freedom and a relaxation that can cause a little magic to come to life.
We live at a time when the minds of intelligent men who might have some artistic gift are uniquely and unprecedentedly unfree, tight, and constricted. Any creation that is the product of their best effort to produce something with "wider implications", be "consciousness raising", and so on, is virtually guaranteed to be dead on arrival. On the other hand, just because xoBang was "insignificant by design", it actually came out pretty sweet -- and got the intended rise out of its audience. I have no doubt that your offensive viral ads were not halfway bad either.
It is not always easy for artistic types to have a good sense of what is and isn't of value in their productions. They like to believe that the thing of value is the serious work which they've thought about and which they have endowed with some wider social significance. Whereas often these are completely worthless, and the creation that has a little value -- that captures a little life, some lightning in a bottle -- is a throwaway troll job; because for a moment, one has relaxed.
This reminded me of the thread about the artist bitch who drew outrageous caricatures of men on Tinder:
http://www.rooshvforum.network/thread-35358.html
This woman is a "serious artist" yet her "real" paintings, which she clearly lavished a great deal of work and attention on, are almost completely uninteresting. But the Tinder caricatures are brilliant and memorable because they were the product of a throwaway inspiration guided by the strong emotions of hatred and contempt. Though not of the same quality, xoBang falls into the same general category.
Quote: (08-07-2014 01:20 PM)LouieG Wrote:
Of course, plenty of content that goes viral without being entertaining. Some of it’s quite upsetting—but still not malignant.
A prime example is the footage of the 2007 Baghdad airstrikes, in which a U.S. Army Apache helicopter attacks and kills unarmed Iraqis and two Reuters reporters. One copy of the video on YouTube has almost 15 million views. To watch it is stomach churning, but your understanding of America’s involvement in Iraq is incomplete until you’ve seen it and read the surrounding story.
Similarly, Gawker’s 2010 story about Christine O’Donnell’s drunken hookup with an almost-stranger was a revealing look at the character of a woman on the verge of becoming a U.S. senator.
In 2011, the child sex scandal involving Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was sickening to read about. But to avert your eyes was to miss the truth about the corrupting influence of athletics in higher education.
Those stories angered those who read them—same as “xoBang” did—but the anger was caused by meaningful information that exposed real problems among America’s leadership and governing institutions. The outrage was worth it. Those stories weren’t malignant.
###
Compare that to xoBang.
What does xoBang tell us about society? About ourselves? What trends does it reveal? What flaws does it expose, or even hint at?
Before anyone thinks too hard about those questions, let me just tell you: xoBang tells us nothing. It reveals nothing. It is not indicative of anything except what two anonymous guys, acting by themselves, wrote in order to get a rise from a small group of Twitter entrepreneurs.
This is exactly 100% wrong. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is and is not of value and interest and where to direct one's attention.
The examples of videos that are listed here -- things like the Baghdad airstrike or the Sandusky case -- are in fact the ones that are guaranteed to be of no value whatsoever, precisely because of their ostensible "larger significance" and "implications" for society and so forth.
To attend to such objects is to drown in a sea of platitudes and received opinion. Everyone's reaction to them will be sorted in accordance to their social and political "commitments" and the whole thing will be entirely unrewarding of attention. There is nothing to see there beyond pious ceremonies of performatively correct response of various kinds that are bizarrely evacuated of all content.
By contrast, your humble creation of xoBang had at least a shot at being somewhat interesting, entertaining, and rewarding of attention, precisely because it was created by yourself and a buddy as a throwaway on a random night with the sole aim of getting a rise out of some internet feminists. That gives it a freedom and a relaxation that can cause a little magic to come to life.
We live at a time when the minds of intelligent men who might have some artistic gift are uniquely and unprecedentedly unfree, tight, and constricted. Any creation that is the product of their best effort to produce something with "wider implications", be "consciousness raising", and so on, is virtually guaranteed to be dead on arrival. On the other hand, just because xoBang was "insignificant by design", it actually came out pretty sweet -- and got the intended rise out of its audience. I have no doubt that your offensive viral ads were not halfway bad either.
It is not always easy for artistic types to have a good sense of what is and isn't of value in their productions. They like to believe that the thing of value is the serious work which they've thought about and which they have endowed with some wider social significance. Whereas often these are completely worthless, and the creation that has a little value -- that captures a little life, some lightning in a bottle -- is a throwaway troll job; because for a moment, one has relaxed.
This reminded me of the thread about the artist bitch who drew outrageous caricatures of men on Tinder:
http://www.rooshvforum.network/thread-35358.html
This woman is a "serious artist" yet her "real" paintings, which she clearly lavished a great deal of work and attention on, are almost completely uninteresting. But the Tinder caricatures are brilliant and memorable because they were the product of a throwaway inspiration guided by the strong emotions of hatred and contempt. Though not of the same quality, xoBang falls into the same general category.
same old shit, sixes and sevens Shaft...