Okay, yes: I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately. I used to watch a lot of movies, but I feel like there’s not a lot of interesting stuff happening there and I wonder if culturally we need a little break from the 90-120 minute format for storytelling. So I’ve been watching TV shows, where the plot arc is long and filled with potential for character development. Character development is just about the only thing I’m interested in watching these days. Well, okay, character development and shirtless men. I have facets.
I was a kid in the 80s, when TV (and fashion) was awful. Characters had one dimension; plots were hackneyed and predictable. Characters didn’t develop, and the end of an episode was like a magic reset button; nothing changed, everything went back to how it had been at the beginning of the episode. How it had always been.
Online, I’ve noticed that people of my generation seem to be doing this to themselves: casting one facet of their personality in the role of The Interesting Thing About me so they can blog about it and (eventually, I assume it’s hoped) get a book deal or a television show of their very own. Tech blogs, political blogs, movie blogs, mommy blogs – if you can name it, there’s someone out there blogging about it to the exclusion of all else. It draws an audience of like-minded people, and soon you get a marvelous infinite recursion*, where the only change is that opinions get more extreme, entrenched and isolated from the rest of the world. Read the rest of this entry »
