I'm so fucking done with the endless pop culture critiques. I'm talking about the endless amount of psychological breakdowns of every show ever, and calling it "media literacy." No. No it's not. If you think that you should be diagnosing fictional characters and administering treatment plans to them, rather than learning from them, you do not understand how to consume media.
You guys. We literally cannot get any benefits from the arts in the social media distribution system. Why?
Because it makes us defensive in our consumption--we have to assume everything is propaganda, and reduce the characters in front of us to symbols of good and bad--this is no way to consume media, necessary as this posture is.
You have to enter a space, ready to be immersed. At least on first viewing. You have to go WITH the characters. You can't be constantly fighting them with therapy speak. It's your time to be passive--with the understanding the curtain comes up, and you're back to yourself.
And on the subject, here's how you can tell if you're watching something that's total crap or not.
Are you watching it because you feel smarter than the characters? Or superior to them? Then you aren't consuming art, you're consuming a primer for advertising, or advertising itself.
Are you watching because you want to see what the characters see, and broaden your perspective? Then your media has some nutritional value.
And if you're feeling superior to characters in great works of art instead of finding the common humanity or learning new things, you are rejecting the art of it. Maybe it doesn't resonate. Or maybe you won't let it in.
But I'm so fucking over all the moralizing media analysis, the breakdowns of how scenes "manipulate" you.
The answer isn't to change our attitude to one of skepticism when we take in media. It's to make our media DISTRIBUTION not mind-fuck us.
If you are not taking in endless amounts of information, and have both time and distance after consuming media, you can simply take what is useful and leave the rest behind. You can see the forest for the trees.
But when you're taking in every article on the planet 24/7, you risk going down some pipeline to crazy-town if you fully invest in what you're consuming.
Art is important. How we take it in is important. And we need to enable ourselves to get the benefits from it.
SmutMagDotArt
James Crowley