A comment by komponisto got me thinking. Why are favorite movie/book/tv show/etc exchanges typically low on content? Do they need to be? Here’s a sample exchange, exaggerated for comic effect:
X: “Did you see The Hangover 2?”
Y: “No. I don’t feel compelled to.”
X: “Why not? I think it looks really funny! Don’t you think it looks really funny? Plus, the first one was funny.”
Y: “I didn’t see the first one. Like everyone, I enjoy the physical experience of laughter, but I expect that if I laugh at all during this particular movie, it will be ‘uncomfortable situation’ or ‘shocking moment’ tension-releasing laughter, or at best ‘aren’t we all having a nice time together in front of this huge image and amidst these loud noises.’ I seriously doubt that I will experience the transportive joy of ‘in spite of myself,’ ‘my stomach hurts,’ ‘I can’t breathe,’ ‘this is better than an orgasm’ laughter. In fact, the incidence of that kind of laughter post-adolescence is disappointingly low. Do you ever think about that? Do you worry that the best kind of laughter vanishes as our lives contain fewer and fewer novel experiences?”
X: “Uh… ”
Y: “Exactly. So why would I want to pay $12 to hollowly go through the motions?”
X: “How can you be sure you won’t laugh?”
Y: “I guess I can’t be 100% sure. Nothing in the advertising speaks to my cached expectations of what constitutes true funniness. Are you sure you’ve made a conscious decision to see The Hangover 2 specifically because you expect to laugh really hard? And that’s why you’re willing to invest your hard-earned money?”
X: “I don’t know. It just seems like a fun thing to do. I like Zach Galifianakis. He’s so weird.”
...and so forth. I sometimes get the sense that LWers advocate using their bird’s-eye-view of interpersonal communication to blend in rather than exclude, but I personally prefer to challenge others because I wish to be challenged. That way, I believe I’m more likely to form relationships that rest on equal footing.
This isn’t a comprehensive thesis or anything, but rather an attempt to start a conversation. The general idea is that most people talk about the arts in order to get to know each other—as well as decide who they wish to know. Why not improve the signal/noise ratio?
I propose an exercise: pick a work of art. It can a book, a movie, whatever. Try to find the line between mostly subjective (your mood at the time, your anticipated experience, your ingroup(s) and your relative need to signal membership) and mostly objective (relationship to established forms). Unless you are an artist in that particular medium, your responses will fall mostly in the subjective column. The objective is to go from “______ sucked/was awesome” to “______ caused me to have internal experiences A, B, C, H, and R. Did you have different experiences? If so, why?”
A less wrong way to discuss the arts?
A comment by komponisto got me thinking. Why are favorite movie/book/tv show/etc exchanges typically low on content? Do they need to be? Here’s a sample exchange, exaggerated for comic effect:
X: “Did you see The Hangover 2?”
Y: “No. I don’t feel compelled to.”
X: “Why not? I think it looks really funny! Don’t you think it looks really funny? Plus, the first one was funny.”
Y: “I didn’t see the first one. Like everyone, I enjoy the physical experience of laughter, but I expect that if I laugh at all during this particular movie, it will be ‘uncomfortable situation’ or ‘shocking moment’ tension-releasing laughter, or at best ‘aren’t we all having a nice time together in front of this huge image and amidst these loud noises.’ I seriously doubt that I will experience the transportive joy of ‘in spite of myself,’ ‘my stomach hurts,’ ‘I can’t breathe,’ ‘this is better than an orgasm’ laughter. In fact, the incidence of that kind of laughter post-adolescence is disappointingly low. Do you ever think about that? Do you worry that the best kind of laughter vanishes as our lives contain fewer and fewer novel experiences?”
X: “Uh… ”
Y: “Exactly. So why would I want to pay $12 to hollowly go through the motions?”
X: “How can you be sure you won’t laugh?”
Y: “I guess I can’t be 100% sure. Nothing in the advertising speaks to my cached expectations of what constitutes true funniness. Are you sure you’ve made a conscious decision to see The Hangover 2 specifically because you expect to laugh really hard? And that’s why you’re willing to invest your hard-earned money?”
X: “I don’t know. It just seems like a fun thing to do. I like Zach Galifianakis. He’s so weird.”
...and so forth. I sometimes get the sense that LWers advocate using their bird’s-eye-view of interpersonal communication to blend in rather than exclude, but I personally prefer to challenge others because I wish to be challenged. That way, I believe I’m more likely to form relationships that rest on equal footing.
This isn’t a comprehensive thesis or anything, but rather an attempt to start a conversation. The general idea is that most people talk about the arts in order to get to know each other—as well as decide who they wish to know. Why not improve the signal/noise ratio?
I propose an exercise: pick a work of art. It can a book, a movie, whatever. Try to find the line between mostly subjective (your mood at the time, your anticipated experience, your ingroup(s) and your relative need to signal membership) and mostly objective (relationship to established forms). Unless you are an artist in that particular medium, your responses will fall mostly in the subjective column. The objective is to go from “______ sucked/was awesome” to “______ caused me to have internal experiences A, B, C, H, and R. Did you have different experiences? If so, why?”