Hayteria
22-11-2008, 22:01
Then why are there documentaries like "Does TV Kill" that use TV as a medium?
Granted, I don't know much about the context of the statement in my subjectline, but I'm using how ironic it would sound on its own to make point. For my 600th post I've decided to talk about when people associate a medium, or even genre within a medium, with a style and message.
I recall from middle school a "read for [insert year# here] seconds" day once a year, not sure how many there were when I was there, (once or twice, probably) and it didn't matter what you were reading so long as it was a text novel without pictures. I remember even bringing the novel adaptation of the movie Cats and Dogs. I sometimes wonder, what exactly is it about books, in and of themselves, that makes the education system try to promote them over all other media? One argument I've heard is that if you're reading something you imagine the settings for the scenarios in your own mind which "triggers creativity;" but who's to say video games don't trigger creativity? I remember one article from an issue of Time Magazine (EDIT: here's a link to it (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1056290,00.html)) where some of the arguments made (especially the one that used games like Zelda and Sim City as examples to challenge the idea that video games are passive entertainment) were quite appealing to me.
And speaking of video games, I've noticed while some who don't think games are art supposedly think it's because they're too passive, others like Roger Ebert say it's because they're not passive enough... granted, they're probably not contradicting themselves but each other, but with such contradictory reasons I can't help but get the impression that it's not necessarily the underlying reason. It's like in that article I linked to earlier, making a reference to whether or not "video games" promote violence; at the very least, it depends on which video games you're referring to. I haven't played Myst but from what I've heard of it it's relatively non-violent...
It's like when people claim that rap isn't music not because it's spoken instead of sung, but because it's "all about money, women, and cars"; no matter how many examples of otherwise you name, some people will consider them "exceptions to a rule" but who says it's a rule that a genre has an inherent subject? I don't think of Tupac Shakur, Immortal Technique, etc... as "exceptions to a rule"; they're what I think of when I think of rap.
But ironically, sometimes I'll say similar things myself, such as when calling the TV the "idiot box" when talking about TV news vs. Internet news, despite knowing that some intellectual things, like Carl Sagan's Cosmos series, used to be on TV. Do I have favoritism of one medium over others? Yes, I tend to prefer the Internet, since it seems to be a combination of different other media. You can read books, play online video games, or watch clips from TV news... and for that matter, said TV news clips could be used in ways to point out something that you might not get with TV news alone, whether in pointing out instances of a politician contradicting himself (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c), or using different networks' versions of a news story to catch one of them quoting a different politician out of context (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDw5a0_iFBk). And if you want balance, you can specifically seek different perspectives on an issue itself, rather than just balance between different arbitrary sets of several specific perspectives on different issues with each other at the same time...
Granted, I don't know much about the context of the statement in my subjectline, but I'm using how ironic it would sound on its own to make point. For my 600th post I've decided to talk about when people associate a medium, or even genre within a medium, with a style and message.
I recall from middle school a "read for [insert year# here] seconds" day once a year, not sure how many there were when I was there, (once or twice, probably) and it didn't matter what you were reading so long as it was a text novel without pictures. I remember even bringing the novel adaptation of the movie Cats and Dogs. I sometimes wonder, what exactly is it about books, in and of themselves, that makes the education system try to promote them over all other media? One argument I've heard is that if you're reading something you imagine the settings for the scenarios in your own mind which "triggers creativity;" but who's to say video games don't trigger creativity? I remember one article from an issue of Time Magazine (EDIT: here's a link to it (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1056290,00.html)) where some of the arguments made (especially the one that used games like Zelda and Sim City as examples to challenge the idea that video games are passive entertainment) were quite appealing to me.
And speaking of video games, I've noticed while some who don't think games are art supposedly think it's because they're too passive, others like Roger Ebert say it's because they're not passive enough... granted, they're probably not contradicting themselves but each other, but with such contradictory reasons I can't help but get the impression that it's not necessarily the underlying reason. It's like in that article I linked to earlier, making a reference to whether or not "video games" promote violence; at the very least, it depends on which video games you're referring to. I haven't played Myst but from what I've heard of it it's relatively non-violent...
It's like when people claim that rap isn't music not because it's spoken instead of sung, but because it's "all about money, women, and cars"; no matter how many examples of otherwise you name, some people will consider them "exceptions to a rule" but who says it's a rule that a genre has an inherent subject? I don't think of Tupac Shakur, Immortal Technique, etc... as "exceptions to a rule"; they're what I think of when I think of rap.
But ironically, sometimes I'll say similar things myself, such as when calling the TV the "idiot box" when talking about TV news vs. Internet news, despite knowing that some intellectual things, like Carl Sagan's Cosmos series, used to be on TV. Do I have favoritism of one medium over others? Yes, I tend to prefer the Internet, since it seems to be a combination of different other media. You can read books, play online video games, or watch clips from TV news... and for that matter, said TV news clips could be used in ways to point out something that you might not get with TV news alone, whether in pointing out instances of a politician contradicting himself (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c), or using different networks' versions of a news story to catch one of them quoting a different politician out of context (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDw5a0_iFBk). And if you want balance, you can specifically seek different perspectives on an issue itself, rather than just balance between different arbitrary sets of several specific perspectives on different issues with each other at the same time...