so nerds and scifi franchises

[Akhlut]

(bonus question: why do people listen to a song multiple times?)

why do most people who don't appreciate art and deep stuff still watch and consume media?

Each of these questions have very similar answers, I think: because modern Homo sapiens are inherently artistic animals. The presence of art is basically the only thing to differentiate between anatomically modern humans who didn't behave like us from behaviorally modern humans. Somewhere around 50k years ago, humans started making art and believing in spirits and shit like that. So, to an extent, most people love listening to music and consuming media because that's just how humans work.

[uraniun235]

It boggled my mind to read a post that appeared to imply that listening to songs over and over again is stupid.

that was not my intended message

[The Spartan]

How are you supposed to critically consume sports, though? It's a tribalistic experience based on emotional connections with a location being represented by a group of people you support.

Cheering at a game might be, but you can do it in a intellectual way.

Tracking players for fantasy sports, for example, requires paying attention, knowing the difference between a lucky streak or an actual improvement, who's just in a slump or who's fallen off the age cliff, who's best for what stats you need, who you can drop to fit that person on to your roster, etc., etc.

[Zod]

How are you supposed to critically consume sports, though? It's a tribalistic experience based on emotional connections with a location being represented by a group of people you support.

Cheering at a game might be, but you can do it in a intellectual way.

Tracking players for fantasy sports, for example, requires paying attention, knowing the difference between a lucky streak or an actual improvement, who's just in a slump or who's fallen off the age cliff, who's best for what stats you need, who you can drop to fit that person on to your roster, etc., etc.

Fantasy Football is just D&D for jocks.

[Akhlut]

How are you supposed to critically consume sports, though? It's a tribalistic experience based on emotional connections with a location being represented by a group of people you support.

Cheering at a game might be, but you can do it in a intellectual way.

Tracking players for fantasy sports, for example, requires paying attention, knowing the difference between a lucky streak or an actual improvement, who's just in a slump or who's fallen off the age cliff, who's best for what stats you need, who you can drop to fit that person on to your roster, etc., etc.

That's not really critical consumption, though, that's just stat tracking. It's like a versus debate, which isn't anymore critical consumption of media than just sitting there and absorbing it mindlessly to parrot Monty Python or Adventure Time quotes.

That's the thing: sports has no overarching narrative to it. The only plausible narrative achieved is through retrospection, but it also one which doesn't have much of an overarching theme to it, aside from the possible ones of "perseverance and hard work can make a group of people into champions" or "man, Joe Paterno really should have been a little more proactive when he heard one of his former assistant coaches was a pederast".

[The Spartan]

Ah, okay. I misunderstood you.

Edit: or, rather, the question.

[Akhlut]

To expand a bit: I think sports appeal to people on a very emotional, basal level by creating an inclusive setting for the formation of a part of identity. For instance, Texas A&M fosters the "Aggie" spirit to an extreme extent, and collegiate sports events it participates in (especially football) help reinforce that particular identity among Aggies. It's a bonding ritual and appeals to an innate sense of tribalism that people have. It works similarly among professional sports, collegiate sports, high school sports, all the way down to toddler leagues. It creates a sense of fellowship through shared struggle, hardship, and success, but it is mostly similar throughout all sports the world over. Aside from what sport is being played, there is not much qualitative difference between the fans of team sports the world over, from cricket to curling to football to soccer and everything else.

But, again, there isn't a thematic thread running through sports. It might be able to be analyzed from a sort of meta point of view as a commentary upon tribalism in humans, but it isn't unique to sports and probably isn't really applicable to each individual competition, unlike a literary/critical analysis of a single piece of other media (episode of a sitcom, a single comic book, a novel, etc.).

[Akhlut]

Well, damn, you replied before I did. Well, I still like what I wrote there so I'm leaving it up there.

[Questor]

It boggled my mind to read a post that appeared to imply that listening to songs over and over again is stupid.

that was not my intended message

What you intended has no meaning. It's only what the mainstream literature professors have decided you intended that matters.

[Phantasee]

but then what about individual sports? in motor sports it's driver vs driver, for the most part, despite there often being teams (and you could argue the whole pit crew and design team are part of the team, but only one really performs all the time)

or boxing/mma/etc

people watch these with sufficient knowledge and they have a deeper understanding of the events than the guy who just knows how long it takes RBR to change a tire or how many seconds it takes Button to go through sector 2

[Akhlut]

but then what about individual sports? in motor sports it's driver vs driver, for the most part, despite there often being teams (and you could argue the whole pit crew and design team are part of the team, but only one really performs all the time)

or boxing/mma/etc

people watch these with sufficient knowledge and they have a deeper understanding of the events than the guy who just knows how long it takes RBR to change a tire or how many seconds it takes Button to go through sector 2

I'm just minimally into team sports, and not really a fan of individual sports, as it were. However, from what I have seen, and depending on the individual fan, it depends on a few things. Firstly, the athlete's personality delivers a great deal the impetus for many people to be fans; some people prefer the trash-talking assholes (Mike Tyson, for instance), while others prefer the more noble nice guys (George Foreman). Those with strong, dynamic personalities will often attract very large numbers of fans (Muhammad Ali), while, similarly to group sports, the origin of the individual athlete can also influence fans a great deal too (how many Filipinos who love boxing love Manny Pacquiao due to Pacquiao's birthplace?).

That's my take on it, at anyrate.

[Questor]

That's why individual sports tend to have a different feel. Take the difference between high school golf or tennis and... say... lacrosse.

Heck, go to a high school waterpolo game versus a swim meet. there's a very different feel to the spectators, or even the officiating. It's less confrontational.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Someone move this to new testing, please. I hate that threads with such insight end up disappearing.

[Oxymoron]

Ask and ye shall receive.

[Akhlut]

I still think there isn't much in the way of narrative, though. I think that's true of all "historical" events, if you will. They happen as a conglomerate of human actions, not as a result of an author or group of authors trying to create a narrative for the purpose of delivering a message with a certain theme, moral, and the like. WWII wasn't a morality play, it was an organically-derived event due to the actions of millions of people with agency seeking to perform actions for their own, complex reasons. In history, retrospection introduces a narrative that was never there when the event was unfolding. The very act of looking back creates a narrative, and we must recognize that.

Thus, sports, being the result of the same forces that we see in wars, elections, protests, and the like, share this lack of an actual narrative device as we see in media.

However, the more I think on it, though, there is some minor narrative action interposed onto sports events; namely, the actions used to film it/record it and transmit it to the public. Certain editorial decisions are made to transmit the event to the public at large. However, I still think it is hard to critically consume that as one would another piece of media as far as discerning elements of theme go; I think it would mostly be useful as a study for things like framing and male/female gaze issues, among other things.

[Questor]

There's a huge tribal aspect to it, and it can pervade a lot of things. There are some (often times more than that) valid uses for it.

I believe people when they tell me it's useful - even in an academic setting. If you don't think that the people who create it know what you are doing, you're deluding yourself. To take Akhlut's example, the Texas A&M (Gig'em) was founded as a Land Grant College, and the ROTC (or it's predecessors) was - and still is - a large portion of it's culture. The development of a group identity is a natural part of that. A lot of the public universities in the US were land grant, and when something becomes accepted, people don't generally try to change it.

It occurs to me that it might be interesting to read accounts from some of the older (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) private universities and see if the intentionally developed tribalism was there in the days before the land grant system.

Or, as my father taught me at a very young age...

Not being informed to the highest degree of accuracy, I hesitate to articulate for fear that I may deviate from the true course of rectitude, in short, I am a very dumb fish and DO NOT KNOW, SIR!

[Nietzslime]

You know, the thread's kind of moved on from where it started, but for what it's worth there's nothing really wrong about enjoying a book for its world or setting and the technical or clockwork aspects of its construction that make it up. Some people prefer to analyze this part of a story, the setting, along metrics they are more familiar with because it makes it more comfortable when they imagine this world, and since most works have an element of either otherness or escapism of some kind at some point most normal people will imagine themselves in that world, and how they would interact with it. I mean, if that wasn't the case, aesthetic parts of books would be basically meaningless and attractive people would find very little success in Hollywood. The question 'What would it be like to [be an ad executive in the 60s, be a New Jersey mob boss, rule a fantastical kingdom]?" naturally extends to "What would I do in those places?" and that's a pretty powerful and iconic thing that narratives allow us to do. Having a superiority complex to this sort of reading is ludicrous and moronic.

[Akhlut]

"Shallow" versus "deep" doesn't imply value judgments, either (at least, not necessarily), however, I think that doing some deep analysis from time to time other than just pure escapism is a good thing. I don't have to analyze every Family Guy, for instance, but I think that engaging in a little critical analysis can't hurt and would lead to some better critical thinking skills and hopefully to some better outcomes.

For instance, on TEO, there's a thread about how current media makes minorities feel bad about themselves, and I think that if we gave minorities a lot more tools for critical analysis and did so a lot earlier than we currently do, then that might help reverse that trend, because they can examine stuff according to the context of the media's creation and the intent of the author and so forth. In that case, active, critical consumption can be loads more helpful than passive, uncritical assumption.

Plus, I think in general that having a more active role with our media can only be helpful, because it is only fairly recently that the grand majority of people have dealt with media entertainment they didn't either have a direct part of or couldn't interact with easily (such as oral storytelling among family and friends or theater or whatever).

[Count Chocula]

Giving EVERYBODY, regardless of race, tools for critical analysis and a skeptical approach to the media would help their development, and quite possibly help them relate to each other better.

I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of its occurring in public schools and universities, however.

[Oxymoron]

You know how I know the world is going to end soon ? Because I've the same opinion than Chocula.

[starku]

You know, the thread's kind of moved on from where it started, but for what it's worth there's nothing really wrong about enjoying a book for its world or setting and the technical or clockwork aspects of its construction that make it up. Some people prefer to analyze this part of a story, the setting, along metrics they are more familiar with because it makes it more comfortable when they imagine this world, and since most works have an element of either otherness or escapism of some kind at some point most normal people will imagine themselves in that world, and how they would interact with it. I mean, if that wasn't the case, aesthetic parts of books would be basically meaningless and attractive people would find very little success in Hollywood. The question 'What would it be like to [be an ad executive in the 60s, be a New Jersey mob boss, rule a fantastical kingdom]?" naturally extends to "What would I do in those places?" and that's a pretty powerful and iconic thing that narratives allow us to do. Having a superiority complex to this sort of reading is ludicrous and moronic.

How about where it's so shallow and uncritical it's not even right

Like people who just repeat uncritical dialogue as fact within the work when this is clearly not the case or reduce powerful moments of character work to 'opened the door a bit slow'

I'm not talking about analysing your bullshit fantasy show

I'm talking about people who both examine a work closely or repeatedly and are actually ignorant of basic facts within it because they don't even try to connect anything

I mean if I see something I might think 'let's look that up see what the fans think surely they know more'

And all you find is bald repetition of the superficial events (spot went to the zoo, spot was happy) and no real understanding of them

How can you be obsessed with something and never ask any questions about it

[Count Chocula]

How can you be obsessed with something and never ask any questions about it

You have just defined a fanboy qed

don't matter if it's green bay packers or star trekwarsalactica

[Phantasee]

@rabid: or maybe you should reevaluate your opinion of chocula

just sayin


i don't know how people memorize quotes so readily

i remember most of everything i see and hear and even i don't remember quotes that well

unless i like them which is usually when they are something that can relate to far more than the direct action on screen

kinda like a lot of epigrams

like nietzche made references when we were hanging out and i didn't catch them at all

i'm a bad nerd

[starku]

That's good cause they're like the definition of pretension

Wait it was nua you knew that already lol

And tbh most sports fans have a higher level of understanding than nerds

Although I guess not a lot of it is probably just parroting buzzwords

[Oxymoron]

@rabid: or maybe you should reevaluate your opinion of chocula

just sayin

I know. TBH I'm constantly re-evaluating the opinion I have of everyone. I was simply poking fun at the disagreements I've had in the past with Chocula.