Welcome to the Echo Chamber

Posted by Unknown , Wednesday, July 21, 2010 9:43 PM

A fellow grad student that I follow on Twitter said that Roger Ebert retweets (that is, he basically shows tweets he likes to his own followers verbatim) writers, artists, poets, and the like whose writing is like "bad high school poetry." To which I replied the following:
It's like being able to listen in on someone's echo chamber, or looking over his shoulder and seeing what he sees in the mirror.
Essentially, retweets do two things. One, they carry news like a virus, spreading from one person to another until almost every person on Twitter has at least seen whatever tiny piece of information has caught fire. The other is what I've hinted above - it creates a perfect reflection of a person outside of herself. It is a portrait created through negative space. When Ebert retweets writing, he is showing what he is drawn to and what speaks to him. A rapt follower can hear echoes of Ebert in his retweets. Regardless of whether the echoes are of his heart, his sense of irony, or his own brand of wishful thinking, they are significant.

But there is a danger to the echo chamber, and it's not just a Twitter phenomenon. It's the same phenomenon that populates the local sections of newspapers, and it's the same phenomenon that has kept television news so gossipy and literally incredible. Retweeting becomes a metaphor: the information, or the "tweet," comes from pundits and editors. The retweeters are other pundits and editors. Just as Ebert, a writer and critic by trade, retweets fellow writers and critics, Fox News "retweets" The Drudge Report and Olbermann "retweets" the Huffington Post, and vice versa.

These echoes are dangerous because they have a tendency to become louder than their source. When two phones are put on speaker phone and made to face one another, and then someone utters a single sound, the phones will echo back and forth into each other, becoming so loud they are a single undulating scream. This scream, when translated into words, slanted viewpoints, agendas, misunderstandings (in other words, when it is translated into "human"), is misleading and corrosive.

I used to be just as much a victim of this as anyone else. I mainly stick to Twitter for my news now, but there was a time when I only read blogs. They would report on each other as if the thoughts of other men and women in their living rooms "interpreting" AP press releases was worth something more than the key presses it took to blurt it out. Because what I read mostly aligned with my political beliefs (and if it didn't, I tried to read with an open mind but I often read opposing viewpoints ironically), I stopped reading so critically. I became a bit hollow, and that hollowness was filled with other people's echoes. Yet their echoes were only echoes of others, and those others' echoes were echoes of yet others, and so on and so forth until all that was left was a single, undulating scream. If this is what I was reading, then with what kind of corrosion was I filling myself?

I stopped reading political and news blogs more because they were taking up too much time than that I had some sort of epiphany regarding their effect on me. That doesn't mean, loyal Twitterer that I am, that I don't fall into the trap again every once in a while. But whenever I see a political blog or see pundits on TV, I try to remind myself that, almost always no matter who they are, the words they say come from a hollowness filled with echoes.

The Contrarian and His Ego

Posted by Unknown 9:19 AM

Some of you might not be acquainted with film critic Armond White, but it only takes a simple search at Rotten Tomatoes to get a snapshot of the kind of critic he is. He agrees with the Tomatometer (the aggregate rating for any film on Rotten Tomatoes based on positive and negative reviews from individual critics) only 52% of the time. Not that critics should submit to groupthink, but White's reviews are almost always deliberately contrarian. Famously, he lauded Transformers 2 for visuals and attacked Toy Story 3 for its commercialism. He praised Clash of the Titans (don't even get me started) by saying that it showed "a better sense of meaningful, economic narrative than the mess that Peter Jackson made of the interminable, incoherent Lord of the Rings trilogy."

For once, instead of being forced to look at White as an inaccessible contrarian who gets page views from his dissent, we can finally hear his reasons for his rather heretofore inexplicable role in professional criticism. Whether his reasons are good or not is not really the point. How he answered is the actual wonder. While he says that Roger Ebert, one of the most internationally famous, well-written, and prolific critics, "destroyed film criticism," and while, when asked what other critics he would suggest others read, he could offer no one but himself, it seems obvious that White answered with his ego rather than his heart. Regardless, the interview is worth reading, if only because it is of a professional who seems eternally disgusted with his profession.

[/Film] Armond White: “I Do Think It Is Fair To Say That Roger Ebert Destroyed Film Criticism”

The Indispensable Training Video

Posted by Unknown 8:57 AM

A guide to bowing.



How did you ever live without it?

[Vulture]

Like the New Place?

Posted by Unknown , Tuesday, July 20, 2010 3:38 PM

After a plea for a makeover and a wave from MundaneJane, Monda over at NoTelling took pity on me and made my blog look amazing.  I cannot thank her enough for working her magic.

I told myself that if my blog didn't look like it had been beaten with ugly sticks, stones, bricks, etc., that I would write more often.  It looks like I have no excuse now, because the blog redesign looks absolutely stunning.  

I am formally leaving VDCC as a headstone, a marker of a format that is dead but a passion that is not. Whatever cultural criticism I have, whenever I find my voice in the coil, it will go here.  I still have my Tumblr account, but its future is unknown.  I am not interesting enough to have multiple blogs and  zero redundancy, so it's back to training wheels with one blog, at least for a while.

In other words, I'm back!