I've entered the phase of studio reconstruction where the shit that I need to make work is all working and the shit that should just fucking work is causing explosions. Get two computers to speak over lightpipe to a single speaker controller? CHECK. Fit 12 DVI cables into a space the size of a party sub? CHECK. Get a Mac and a PC to coexist on a proprietary Euphonix subnetwork to speak to 6 different Eucon devices? CHECK. Burn through 500 feet of Cat5E with only two connections that need to be redone? CHECK (It helps if you recite "no whammies no whammies no whammies" like a mantra before you slap them in the cable tester). But then the KVM switch you ordered sucks so hard it sends your Mac Pro into SMC protect and it never resolves hotkeys... and since there are, like, four KVMs in the world that'll handle 4x2 DVI you're kind of fucked. And then you discover that while your Netgear managed switches will both handle link aggregation, the big one has no configurability and the small one has no manual to help you figure out how to get them to speak to each other. Which doesn't really matter 'cuz that Intel driver? For the phatty network card in the big box? The one that's driving your link aggregation strategy? Yeah, there are drivers for Windows 10 but they don't work. Apparently the network functionality for the network card ("network" can be factored out of that sentence) is TBD. And you start to remember why you bailed the fuck out of Windows back in 2004. I watched the Super Bowl through an antenna I mounted on a mast on the roof down a run of RG-6 I had to put under the house to a Silicondust tuner I put on the network that speaks to a Mac Mini running Plex that I send to the receiver over a Chromecast. It's a fuckin' technological tour-de-force and it fuckin' worked... but the irony of my putting four networked devices between the rabbit ears and the screen is not lost on me. Nor is the fact that I have the power to watch 46 channels of free over-the-air broadcasts on my phone in real-time, none of which has anything worth watching. I had an epiphany, while sitting there building Cat5 cables and listening to Reclaiming Conversation. Sherry Turkle's last book basically said "we're fucked, nobody knows how to converse with each other" and her new book basically says "we may be fucked, but if we work at it we can still resurrect our lives somewhat." Here's the epiphany: The rise of young adult fiction and the predominance of giant teen movies full of flat affect are both a consequence of the adoption of the written word as lingua franca of young adults over the subtle nuance of speech and facial expression. When your primary means of interacting with your friends and surroundings is via mediated text, mediated text becomes the most powerful cultural and emotional influence in your life. Reality television is as ascendant among young people as it is because it provides a cliff-noted means of parsing emotion - "this thing happened to me" (footage of thing happening) "here's how I feel about this thing" (footage of thing happening refrain) "secondary perspective on thing" (B-camera footage of thing) "here's how I will resolve this thing" (footage of thing happening reprise). Twilight was lambasted because the characters in it are all ciphers for the reader to wear like a cloak. I found Maze Runner to be Twilight for dudes. In watching the big movies these days, it has become obvious to me that subtlety is gone and emotion is writ large, and unless the target audience is literally "old people", the film will be full of stoic expressions, loud on-the-nose dialog and easily-digestible emotional content. The ability of young people to parse emotional subtext is atrophying, and atrophying rapidly. Haven't quite wrapped my head around it, but it makes me glad I jumped from screenplays to novels.
Do you mean you're glad because you now have a chance to prop up the rapidly atrophying emotional intelligence of younger generations? Or because you're jumping into the right business? My personal anecdata to back this up: I matched with a girl on a dating app, and we talked for a long while over text before we set a date to meet. The highlight was when she told me abruptly about halfway through our conversation that I am "v cool," v meaning very. I was jazzed. Partly because I appreciated her forwardness, partly because I am just sort of starting to get over a wrenching break up. But it dawned on me later. We haven't met yet. Except for some mutual interest to meet, I have no idea what she's like or if there is even any chemistry. But the highlight of my week was texting a girl I haven't met yet that I was paired with algorithmically and her saying I'm v cool. How fucking weird.Haven't quite wrapped my head around it, but it makes me glad I jumped from screenplays to novels.
When your primary means of interacting with your friends and surroundings is via mediated text, mediated text becomes the most powerful cultural and emotional influence in your life.
Glad I'm jumping into the right business. Friend of mine wrote the script for Maze Runner. He ended up with the same manager who dropped me. He's got like three projects set up by Charlize Theron. But his work is largely being driven by authors. It occurs to me that as the 'boomers die, narrative television dies with them. The average age of TV viewers is 44, while the average age of broadcast TV viewers is 53. And I've done lots of work for Smosh and the like and the thing is - big, stupid, overblown facial expressions and physical humor and jokes with zero subtlety not only works when your screen is 5" or less, it works when your native tongue is emoji. I spend my summers observing young people who are deprived of their phones and internet for up to 12 weeks. They still speak in memes and hashtags. It's not that people are getting worse at communicating with each other, they're just getting better at communicating with people they'll never meet.
I don't have time to find it just now, but some linguist (Mary Bucholtz, I think) did a study of nerdy high school and college kids before the rise of text messaging, and thought their linguistic quirks were mostly from speaking in the register of written English rather than spoken English, having spent more time reading than speaking. I'll see if I can dig it up later.
Isn't it more of a shift though, from facial nuance to textual nuance? For me at least, I feel like text communication has become more nuanced over the years. The amount of time that I sometimes put into a single email, text or response just to get it the way I want is well above and beyond what is needed to get the point across. It also makes more sense to me in the context of a generation that is increasingly focused on textual communication as a substitute for face-to-face communication.
Makes sense? Sure. But the shift comes at a terrible price. One thing everyone agrees about the 7 percent rule is that the numbers are wrong. But the only two studies to contest it put the number closer to 20 percent. Whatever the actual percentages are, the amount of information conveyed by me standing in front of you talking is between 4 and 20 times as information-rich as you reading a transcript of what I said. All the nuance of the written word - emoticons, emojis, goofy little pictures, memes, the whole part and parcel of modern online communication - comes from the fact that we used to speak in rainbows and now we speak in purple. We've gotten damn good at speaking in purple - far better than back when we had a spectrum - but the part of your brain that speaks in purple has taken over the parts that speak in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo.