![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Explaining Perspective
Jan. 29th, 2008 01:22 amI'm not a huge Sci-Fi fan in the sense of owning a giant library of books with fancy airbrushed covers or being able to remember minutia from Isaac Asimov books from the 60s. However I have read some of the necessities and enjoy the genre. Even lament it's death as proof of the anti- or faux-intellectual air one breathes from people quite frequently here in the 21st century. Many people understand science not as the observational discipline that it is but as a plot device for CSI or Tomb Raider. This is not to discredit entertainment, I'm not for austerity and enjoy the campy and profane. In fact in recent years the move away from pseudo-Scientific narrative to adaptations of great Fantasy genre books is a welcome departure. I hope at least, you could also interpret it as people being so totally lost in the fray of magical thinking that only the pseudo-biblical, or entirely magical but anti-biblical in the case of The Golden Compass, makes an impression in light of 9/11 or Darfur or what-have-you. This is a big complex and increasingly aware planet. We're all a bit shell shocked and fucked up these days.
One of my favourite futurists is, like many others, William Gibson. Not because his writing is particularly good, I find the stories meandering and unexciting, but the setting and characters are more savvy than they play in the books. One of the characters from The Bridge Trilogy of books is able to detect patterns in information and is literally susceptible to viral marketing. Which is perhaps over-inflated prosaic hyperbole for the real world where we human beings have these untold and often even unnoticed skills of observation. We autonomously take in immeasurable quantities of information in our day to day life. There is still no iPod or hard drive or super computer that can store all the stimulus anyone is exposed to in their day to day life. From the temperature of the keypad on the security door to the torque required to turn it open. The measurement, change and reaction to the sudden lack of inertia when embarking the train or bus. The marketing message repeated, the marketing message repeated, the marketing message repeated. We know that all these little bits of seemingly meaningless but ubiquitous information are stored in our brains, at least temporarily, and we are reminded of them especially if they are routine or exceedingly out of routine.
The crafty nature of viral marketing is it's mode of dissemination. Like it's namesake it is infectious. Not for the alien and unknown intents of a micro-organism but in fact one that is human and totally, utterly and explicably lame. The marketing message repeats across us for the sole purpose of replication. Our animal savant side notices this, audits it and adds it to the roster of our conscious mind. And at this point, if you are a conscious human being, thanks to the marketing infection of your friends you've now got a for-profit message in your head. "Buy a movie ticket to find out".
In the case of "Cloverfield", much like "The Blair Witch Project" before it and many other films in the past, you have a whole press kit, "leaked" images and culture of unpaid viral marketers unfazed by their determination to buy a ticket to a film that is, for all intents and purposes, a product of indeterminate quality. Furthermore fallacies of fair game are strangely misapplied to this highly profitable game of social media hijack. Which is awfully sporting of people to approach this situation with. However the warning I would wave is that when the product doesn't deliver but the marketing technique does we risk really changing the way we communicate. We already live in a public world plastered with marketing messages. The structure of trusted relationships is now being infected with those messages such that there is, in an unlikely but extreme circumstance, no place to particularly get a trusted opinion.
One might think that just dealing with the hype of your friends is totally innocuous. But as I experienced if you buck the trend and are openly critical of people regarding their subscription not to the premise or quality of a movie but to their intrigue with the marketing of the film, well, you get tribe mentality. Belong or get out. Buy the movie ticket or shut up. You are personally offending me if you are not buying into the marketing I am buying into. Those are the, admittedly paraphrased, impressions I was given.
That's disappointingly unthinking and a touch creepy.
One of my favourite futurists is, like many others, William Gibson. Not because his writing is particularly good, I find the stories meandering and unexciting, but the setting and characters are more savvy than they play in the books. One of the characters from The Bridge Trilogy of books is able to detect patterns in information and is literally susceptible to viral marketing. Which is perhaps over-inflated prosaic hyperbole for the real world where we human beings have these untold and often even unnoticed skills of observation. We autonomously take in immeasurable quantities of information in our day to day life. There is still no iPod or hard drive or super computer that can store all the stimulus anyone is exposed to in their day to day life. From the temperature of the keypad on the security door to the torque required to turn it open. The measurement, change and reaction to the sudden lack of inertia when embarking the train or bus. The marketing message repeated, the marketing message repeated, the marketing message repeated. We know that all these little bits of seemingly meaningless but ubiquitous information are stored in our brains, at least temporarily, and we are reminded of them especially if they are routine or exceedingly out of routine.
The crafty nature of viral marketing is it's mode of dissemination. Like it's namesake it is infectious. Not for the alien and unknown intents of a micro-organism but in fact one that is human and totally, utterly and explicably lame. The marketing message repeats across us for the sole purpose of replication. Our animal savant side notices this, audits it and adds it to the roster of our conscious mind. And at this point, if you are a conscious human being, thanks to the marketing infection of your friends you've now got a for-profit message in your head. "Buy a movie ticket to find out".
In the case of "Cloverfield", much like "The Blair Witch Project" before it and many other films in the past, you have a whole press kit, "leaked" images and culture of unpaid viral marketers unfazed by their determination to buy a ticket to a film that is, for all intents and purposes, a product of indeterminate quality. Furthermore fallacies of fair game are strangely misapplied to this highly profitable game of social media hijack. Which is awfully sporting of people to approach this situation with. However the warning I would wave is that when the product doesn't deliver but the marketing technique does we risk really changing the way we communicate. We already live in a public world plastered with marketing messages. The structure of trusted relationships is now being infected with those messages such that there is, in an unlikely but extreme circumstance, no place to particularly get a trusted opinion.
One might think that just dealing with the hype of your friends is totally innocuous. But as I experienced if you buck the trend and are openly critical of people regarding their subscription not to the premise or quality of a movie but to their intrigue with the marketing of the film, well, you get tribe mentality. Belong or get out. Buy the movie ticket or shut up. You are personally offending me if you are not buying into the marketing I am buying into. Those are the, admittedly paraphrased, impressions I was given.
That's disappointingly unthinking and a touch creepy.
