Are you ready for some cosmic truths? I mean are you ready to get your mind totally blown out the wazoo? Then buckle up, buttercup! Here we go!
You, yes; you, can take the most extreme idea your mind can conceive, and receive feedback on that idea almost instantaneously. From practically anywhere in the world.
To put that into its proper perspective, for cartoonists of the 20th century (like myself), the soonest that anyone could realistically read your work would be a day, and that’s exclusive to the ’90s, after computers entered common usage. Before that it could be weeks to months before anyone saw your comics. Point being, mold could possibly grow on an idea before it even saw newsprint. And, as people so often forget, everything you created was filtered through a professional editorial department.
In the 20th century, there was no way for a movie star to get instantaneous reactions from millions of people for their performance, or a film’s premiere. The best they could hope for would be a review in tomorrow’s paper. Live daytime television shows might cover a movie’s opening, but only if it’s massive and famous enough, and again, it’s limited to the show’s viewers. The idea of instantly communicating with almost anyone anywhere in the world, let alone seeing them conveniently queued on a screen, was pure fantasy.
So let’s say you hated and/or were offended by a movie, television program or comic strip in the 20th century. If you decided to forego the sensible path of doing nothing about it, you had two options.
One; somehow find the phone number of the company responsible, and call them. This would almost never result in speaking with a real person, or doing anything but sitting and listening to Muzak (look it up) for as long as you could stand it. Your best hope would be an answering machine or service, or opting to call a radio show and rant about it there, and that’s if there’s a live call-in show happening at that time.
Two; write a letter to your local newspaper. They’ll print an edited, shortened form of your complaint, and there’s probably a 1 in 10,000 chance someone will see it who can benefit from your opinion in any way. You will literally never know one way or the other. Your letter might never be printed, and to find out whether it was, you’d have to get and check a paper every day.
This all may seem inconvenient and ineffectual, but it made for an unspoken yet crucial buffer between creator and audience. Because the process of communication involved unavoidable delays, more forethought was put into the way people lodged complaints. And although it was certainly possible to scream into a telephone, extreme emotions are difficult to convey in writing, and there was a generally agreed upon method of drafting formal letters, complex enough that some folks would hire someone else to do it. This was known as “dictation”; women were naturally great at it. A lot of the time women of the 20th century had serviceable skills on the piano, which might be why they kicked so much ass as stenographers and typists.
Anyway.
Here’s how I opened this article so you can easily reread it:
You, yes; you, can take the most extreme idea your mind can conceive, and receive feedback on that idea almost instantaneously. From practically anywhere in the world.
You can instantaneously destroy someone’s life, or your own. You can instantaneously expose the world to a moment of weakness that should have been reconsidered or rethought, but is now metaphorically marked in stone, and may go on to humiliate you on a level that you never imagined possible, not in your worst nightmares. You can do and/or say something that strangers will never allow you to forget, for as long as you live, and long afterward. You can gift the world the kind of compromising positions that people pay millions of dollars to make go away.
You can unwittingly reveal to the world that you are of substandard intelligence, or that you are a slovenly malfeasant. You can be condemned in the public eye for something as basic as a misunderstood word. You can touch off a chain of events that result in a suicide by bullying; you could be bullied into suicide. All over no more than a comment, or a few seconds of video.
Because the possibility of instantaneous communication of ideas exists, the temptation to constantly be “plugged in” to an audience will always exist as well. Many people, narcissistic personality types in particular, will never be able to resist that temptation. There will always be creative professionals, as well as actors and performers, who will gin up controversy by weighing in on a subject with a take that’s “hot” if we’re lucky, but more often “bad”.
Bad takes are something that, again, once were generally shielded from the public by an editorial professional of some kind. Nowadays the job is up to whatever pedantic personage or program is charged with censoring material that might be legally actionable against the company that owns the platform, and the job is botched more often than not.
Before we had instantaneous communication, if you had a total breakdown as the result of an election, the odds were good that it wasn’t seen by more than one person (if that), and some time afterward you stopped being upset and got on with your life. If you took video footage of yourself being hysterical in the past couple of days, the odds are great that you will be laughed at by tens of thousands of people, because it doesn’t matter what your opinions are or how you feel;
YOU LOOK LIKE AN INSANE MANIAC.
You just gave every good idea you’ve ever had the short shrift, because no one can ever take you seriously ever again, unless somehow the entire internet forgets it ever happened, in which case GOOD LUCK. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.
A guy named Howard Dean ran for president years ago. He had a ton of support behind him until at a rally, he made a funny noise into the microphone. It ended his career and made him a joke on American Dad and The Simpsons. Look it up, you’ll recognize the sound of it. It’s like “AEOOaaaa”. It’s the exact tone of Howard Dean’s political aspirations disintegrating.
But that was all it took.
Because we have instantaneous communication, it is possible, if not probable, to unintentionally associate yourself based on mutually shared ideas and opinions with persons and groups you’d prefer to avoid. It’s possible to drag your own associates, and family members both close and distant, into discussions they can’t understand, and which can cause them to resent or even dislike you.
The disadvantages of instantaneous communication are practically endless.
People in general have gotten way too normal with it. It’s too easy and convenient to express extreme emotions like rage and hysteria to the world at large. Courtesies that accompanied formal usage of telephones and letters; the greeting, the opening statement, the goodbye; these are dust in the digital wind of whatever they call viral videos now. You see a screen name representing the person filming or flipping out. When reading or posting comments, you see one screen name or more and a tiny circular picture representing the person who posted, plus hot hashtags on the side. Dig in, it’s the fast food of communication; informational nutrient content is compressed to speed digestion.
Years ago I wrote a Bands I Useta Like article titled “The Man Who Cries”. In it I made the observation that Obama was the only president I’d ever seen cry, and how it didn’t matter how tragic or sad whatever he was crying about was; all we see is a grown man crying. A grown man- hell, a TWO-TERM PRESIDENT, all pissy-eyed and weepy wee woopy woo wit a quivery lip. sniff BOO HOO HOO SMURFETTE! BOO HOO HOO FER DA WITTLE WEEPY MAN!
What the fuck, bro, you seen any pictures of Clint Eastwood cryin’? You saw First Blood, did you see what it took to get John Rambo to cry? He held that shit in for freakin’ years!
Okay. let me try to wrap this up and sum up my points.
Through wisdom, I am telling you about the dangers and disadvantages of instantaneous communication. Through working with editors and newspapers, I became wired to accept the schedule by which my artwork would be exposed to a general audience. By nature, this allowed for a natural buffer that modern social media does not in any way utilize. By nature, we were afforded the privilege of allowing our ideas, remarks, and even our emotions to stew if necessary.
Exposing our children to methods of instantaneous communication has robbed them of any ability to use forethought, or the opportunity to reconsider actions and words that may cause them legitimate mental anguish and harm, in both the short and long term. Entertainment is now faster than fast food, and a billion opportunities exist to do a billion different inappropriate things, and spread them around the world faster than any corporeal virus. Children can be communicated with by virtually anyone, anywhere, and their privacy can be invaded down the last detail, thanks to their smartphones, and supervision ops masquerading as game apps. There are currently adults who have never known life unobserved. You may be one of them.
Despite the fact that I’ve maintained a public internet presence for 25 years, I owe much of that longevity to the fact that I still maintain a buffer of sorts in producing material online, even if it’s only due to proofreading and going through several revisions. I’ve never experienced positive results from getting hysterical about a topic, certainly not on social media, and I try to be very careful about how I present myself to the world, in any form, because I’m all too aware of the multitudinous rough edges of my persona.
Just to set the record straight; that sardonic, vulgar, bilious, over-the-top, vitriolic guy you see me as on social media or whatnot; that’s me being consistent with who I’ve been since high school. It’s not an affectation; it’s the hand I was dealt. I literally wrote acerbic movie reviews for Creative Loafing before most of you were born. I was getting comic strips sent back by grumpy editors for revision and/or removal of objectionable material 33 years ago. I have experiences, skills and a body of artistic knowledge that money can’t buy. Take a look sometime at the breadth of what I’ve created thus far. In a sane world I’d be living off a MacArthur Genius Grant. I’m not even joking.
I’m the last of a dying breed, a high-powered mutant of some kind never considered for mass production, and I’m trying to teach you, to impart a piece of the wisdom I’ve gained as one man who’s created cartoons that have been seen around the world, both moving and in print.
Hysteria is always a bad look. It is impossible to respect, or feel anything but pity and revulsion for, a human being that is losing control of themselves in front of a lens or group. There may come a day when I am proven wrong; I would argue that the odds will forever remain on my side. Intelligent people respect decorum and strive not to break it. That being said, someone falling out of a chair will always generate laughter, because of the unintentional and relatably embarrassing break of decorum.
A grown person freaking out and crying, much as a child would, will always be a bad look, unless intended for laughs, based upon the break in decorum of an adult behaving like a baby. For example, Lou Costello’s comedic persona was rooted in childish behavior. Curly Howard is another example of the same style of performance.
I don’t want any of you to learn the harsh lessons that so many have learned the hard way, by getting publicly humiliated over an opinion, an idea, or an embarrassing moment caught on video. Get in the habit (as I do) of writing your ideas out longhand, instead of posting them on the internet. Get out of the habit of oversharing on social media. Doodle in a notebook or sketch pad. See how long you can go without commenting on anything online.
Try harder. Be better.
Before long you’ll see how being terminally connected can make you a jack of all trades and a master of none. You’ll realize that no matter how much interesting content you can witness in a day, you don’t retain a bit of it, even if it makes you upset or angry. Your brain will subconsciously hit reset tomorrow when you wake up, and you won’t even remember unless your computer brings it up again. There is no reason for you to place any of the knowledge you supposedly gain in a day of any more importance than what you ate for lunch. Mass death and disaster is remembered no longer than a McDonalds ad.
And all this boils down to the fact that any one of us can instantaneously communicate with almost anyone, any time, anywhere in the world. If one of us exhibits extremely negative behavior on video, one of us can find a thousand other people doing the same thing, at the same time, even for the same reason (or lack thereof). That’s not any kind of net positive for humanity. That’s abuse of technology.
But then, without abuse of technology, we wouldn’t have shitposts, or trolls, which is where I tend to get my jollies. However, much like prank phone calls, there is an art to it, and a little goes a very long way. If you can’t see that, you might be taking the internet too seriously, which is something you should never do. Never take anything seriously unless it can chase after you, and potentially pull out your arteries.
Good night, and thank you as always for your support.
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