On macro versus micro in discussion.

I was browsing through a standard gender politics debate over at Tvtropes.org, as I'm so wont to do, when I had a recent revelation.  A former acquaintance of mine once told me that Scrabble wasn't about intelligence, but about seeing patterns.  And I suddenly saw a Pattern in that Tvtropes forum discussion that made it look hilariously familiar.

Gender-related discussions online, at least, tend to center around large and vague concepts.  One side presents an idea - women (or men, to some minority povs) are overwhelming oppressed by the inherent structure of society.  And then naturally someone else, often but not always playing for the other team, tells them they're full of it.  Then both sides start bringing out individual examples and counterexamples of oppression or its lack.  We could apply the same thing to racial politics as well, or to any discussion where a large group of people is theoretically but not necessarily literally functionally equivalent to any other large group of people in terms of advantages and disadvantages.

While both sides may get something to think about from the individual examples provided, at the end of the day it's all anecdotal.  Except for the statistics, which can be pointed out as being misinterpreted or countered by other statistics.  People don't change their positions on a fundamental level because their position are hinged on an overarching ideology that is inherently difficult to prove or disprove.

'Truth' is a surprisingly malleable substance even when all involved parties are doing their darnedest to sincerely find it.

Do you know what that sounds EXACTLY like?

Competitive gaming debates.  No, seriously.  That gamer you look down on for screaming that something he fights against is overpowered, or that something he uses is underpowered, sounds EXACTLY like you when you talk about how bad you have it or how much better the other side has it and they don't even realize it.  And anyone who's watched a gaming forum debate on these ephemeral power levels go on for more than two seconds can immediately realize that it's self-defeating and self-obfuscating.

Take Starcraft 2 as an example.  Is Zerg overpowered or underpowered?  Who cares, when whether something is 'over' or 'under' can completely flip-flop based on a single unit change in a single patch, or a map change, or the dominant strategies at a tournament that shift the metagame, or any of a million other factors?

What you should be focusing on in a game is whether X, Y or Z is FUN or not, and you can only do that by zooming in to look at the micro.  Does a given unit perform its role adequately?  Are win ratios for all races roughly equal for a given map?  Is a particularly ability underused or overused?  Small things, things you can take apart and dissect.  Things that, no matter which race you play or how you feel about it, you can mostly agree on being right or wrong.

Those are the things people should be focusing on in gender debates, too.  If you speak in terms of 'Women are consistently paid worse wages at Walmart,' then you have a specific problem to solve and a specific entity to punish for causing it.  But when you go to overarching ideological things like the very foundation of how society functions and how it all fits together as a whole, you're only going to get a lot of people disagreeing with your premise, which hinders your ability to get anything done.

So drop the premise.  Drop the framing.  Be practical.  Focus on the little things where you know you can make a difference, the things you know you can get other people to agree with you on.  The big things are just collections of lots of small things, and if you keep on working on those dominoes, eventually the big things will tend to themselves, too.

That's not to say that there isn't a place for macro or ideology, but it has to be at a point where the concept involved is just so revolutionary that it challenges fundamental assumptions and biases.  Back when the US had slaves, there was no question that a black man was worth less than a white man.  Saying, ideologically, that a human was a human regardless of skin color was a very powerful statement.  But if equality is close enough that people can pretend that everything's equal, then there's no point in trying to run a premise on an assumption of inequality.  Once you're close enough to squint and not tell the difference, you have to stop looking at the broad ideas and start looking at the specifics, the little details that are easy to miss.

So if you have something that you want to convince people about, stick with circumstances that are immediately applicable and easy to relate to, rather than using large-scale ideas that only widen the gap between your point of view and another person's.  You want them to know how it is to walk a mile in your shoes?  Tell them how your shoes make your toes feel in Dickensian detail.

It's easy to underestimate South Park. Re: Human CentiPad..

Let's be fair - South Park didn't catapult to fame because of wit or insightful political commentary. It's famous because it's vulgar. It's successful because it's vulgar. Yet the more I look at things like this, the more I find that the traits that enable profit and success aren't always the same traits that make that product important in terms of artistic evolution or creative design. When you think about South Park, you think about little children making potty jokes. And there are so many conservative people who cast judgment right there and refuse to see what else the show has to offer. That's a real shame, because the show, very ironically, has a lot to offer specifically to the kind of audience that's most likely to judge swiftly and turn away in revulsion.

The newest episode, Human Centipad, is an excellent example of what the show has evolved into. The actual quality of the episode, I leave for you to figure out yourself - the internet is full of plenty of people saying it was both the worst and the best episode ever. This is not a show prone to creating audience consensus. But the essential structure of dichotomy is there, clear as ever. We have the almost incomprehensibly vulgar on the one hand, and on the other hand, we have the underlying messages that vulgarity is being used for.

The basic plot is a Human Centipede spoof. That was an amusing movie by my extremely morbid standards, but it was a movie with just one (really creative) gimmick and not much else to drive it. But in so much less running time, South Park manages to take this spoof and make it do so much more than it ever did in the original movie.

The movie had no morals, no lessons beyond 'Sometimes bad things happen to annoying people.' It had horror without depth. South Park transforms that horror into comedy and uses it to propel very real and applicable messages into the viewer's brain. Commentary on the legality and morality of those endlessly long online agreements we all click through blindly. Commentary on the Apple brand, its marketing, the culture around it. Commentary on the nature of the human mind's detritus, of our desperate desire to share our mentally digested hobbies with others, as though they'd want our crap.

South Park and Serial Experiments Lain are nothing alike, but the two meet in agreement in this episode, both saying 'We will all be connected.' The difference is in presentation, but nos so much in message - South Park is a lot more cynical about it, understanding that closer contact to human beings also means inevitable degradation, loss of privacy, loss of control over things we take for granted. And the benefits? We get meaningless information we could often do without. Information that can poison us and typically disgusts us while providing no real nutrition to the mind.

Yet the Human CentiPad monstrosity isn't condemned in episode. Quite the contrary, it's taken as inevitable. At the end, all they can say, nervously, is 'Can't we go a little slower?' None of the issues brought up have any real resolution. They're here, we have to live with them. That's all.

Once you look beyond the vulgarity, there's a lot South Park has to offer, even for conservatives. Maybe even especially for conservatives. Yet the vulgarity itself is also crucial to the show, because it's the fist that pummels these messages into you. So, the next time you start dismissing a piece of art because it has a bit more swearing than you like, or nudity, or something else that's beyond the pale... stop and consider if it might not be using those things for more than just shock value.

Lain is no longer special. Everyone's wired now, baby.

I'd have to say the most interesting, empowering, and simultaneously terrifying of social networking utilities I've tentatively delved into thus far is Twitter.  Twitter, by far.  I've been on AIM and such things for years, but Twitter is a different beast, and one I strongly suspect to be man-eating.  And unlike the tiger in the Jungle Book, this sucker has teeth that stay as perpetually sharp as people's opinions.

The sheer penetration of Twitter, and the way it puts the casual side note thoughts of our lives into text to be sent, reacted to, responded to... it's really nothing short of amazing.  Used to be, you had an idle thought, you scribbled it down in your diary, at the MOST.  And no one was SUPPOSED to read that!  Now, our mental flotsam and jetsam is purged from our minds and placed onto what is hopefully a receptacle more suitable for holding such detritus.

As a writer, I'm highly mindful of this in terms of Content.  It's rare that I have things I want to say that are actually 140 characters or less.  If I'm going to say something, it's going to be a worthwhile addition to the discussion with somewhat objective value and a modicum of thought put into it, and that usually means a ton of words.  If I don't have such a suitably thought out thought, then it typically never leaves my head.  I am, by nature, a highly non-spontaneous person, especially in text.  In fact, it would be accurate to say that I live in a state of perpetually barely suppressed stark raving terror at the potential negative consequences of every single action.

So imagine, then, what this textual coward thought when placed exactly one Twitter's distance away from some of his most beloved authors, voice actors, and celebrities.  Follow them?  Of course you're going to follow them!  You ARE a 'true fan,' aren't you?  Yet, no matter how many thousands of followers they rack up, it nonetheless feels almost voyeuristic, to read these offhand 140 character non sequiturs, random opinions on low-key news, idle comments on how the day happens to be going.  Now, here comes the part that most inspires my inner coward to lift up his head and froth at the mouth.  True fan that you are, how do you respond to such terse, non-directed yet somehow oddly personal content?

There's a format to a fan letter, along with many implicit agreements about what is and what is not creepy.  I understand these things.  You write some long eloquent adoring rant that tries to be respectful while also expressing a sentiment that you find embarrassing to admit to in everyday life, and if you're lucky and the object of interest isn't too swamped by such things, yours gets read with a certain amount of appreciation.  On the other hand, if the person is swamped, then you can assume your letter was only skimmed with disinterest, if read at all.  But that's not your fault, not the fault of your content.  You did your best to express the impact they made on your life.  That's just the fault of the statistics.  Who could read their thousandth fan letter with as much gravity as their first?  No one.  And so one is given a fair shot at acceptance, and rejection, if it does come, is excusable and impersonal.

Twitter's different.  Your idol is right there.  Right there.  RIGHT THERE.  There's a fairly good chance they'll see whatever you type in a Tweet reply, if only because the time involved is oh so much less than reading a letter.  You've got 140 characters to prove yourself a respectful and sensible human being yet also a devoted and appreciative fan, and how do you do it?  Do you allow yourself non sequiturs, if your idol opens up with one?  Do you attempt witticisms over their personal interests?  Try to draw out discussions?  God forbid, do you ever dare express even the slightest human warmth or sentimentality in such an environment, exposed on all sides to the predation of trolls?

But the trolls aren't the worst part.  They're not even on the fringes of the worst possibilities radar.  No, the truly horrifying thing is having your idol judge you, dismiss your reply, dislike your Tweet, and thereby render your entire life valueless based on 140 characters.  With the ability to communication comes the ability to be rejected outright, and no matter how mild or offhand that rejection may be from one party, the other half can't help but feel soul-shattered.  Words and reactions have value to us, not in and of themselves, but according to how highly we value the speaker.

Rationally, we could dismiss this line of thought in any number of ways.  It's impossible to be deep and interesting in 140 characters.  Twitter isn't the format for getting to know people as such, especially those moving in diverse social circles.  It's a shallow medium meant for shallow things.  The fact that someone dislikes one short message doesn't mean the rest of your life accomplishments have been rendered negligible.  Your idols are imperfect, as are you, so one shouldn't place so much value on their own off the cuff reactions that may not necessarily have had a lot of thought put into them, either.

But being a fan is inherently about being as irrational as one is allowed to be in polite society.  And right now, my inner coward has a very, very loud voice.

Perhaps it'll get better once I get used to it.  Let's see how things stand after a few months of exposure to the freedom of the medium.