This reminded me of the collective consciousness reached in Jennifer Egan’s Candy House (the entire human experience reduced to itemised letters and numbers leading to the creation of the ultimate cloud). Potential technological advancements aside this raised some questions about what this type of collective consciousness could mean. Am in agreement we don’t need to desperately seek originality or authenticity (a la Natalie Portman suddenly bursting into dance in Garden State) for a story to be worth telling (god knows I’ve unashamedly enjoyed enough enemies to lovers rom-coms in my time and cannot wait for the next). And perhaps we all just want to be understood and contain the world around us blah blah… But will there be a saturation point, compounded by the internet’s obsession with constantly categorising just about everyone and everything? Maybe there’s a concern, or possible computer bug, we’ll come up against in people becoming overly cognisant of tropes and externalising them to the extent that they start performing tropes and archetypes in their everyday lives. So we lose the space for authenticity?
Before I go off on a tangent about the controlled spaces performing archetypes might be useful (saturnalias and such) my main point I think here is a question of self-fulfilling prophecy and the a post-modern overly-iterative world (see AI services creating text based on previous text and so on). Ergo everything is overly consumed, iterative, inauthentic, and devoid of meaning. Bad. Or maybe it’ll all be chill to be fair.
"Maybe there’s a concern, or possible computer bug, we’ll come up against in people becoming overly cognisant of tropes and externalising them to the extent that they start performing tropes and archetypes in their everyday lives. So we lose the space for authenticity?"
I've always been really interested by this idea, but it's impossible to measure outside of anecdotes and observation. As far as I can tell, essentially everyone already bases their behaviour as much on archetypes from fiction as they must once have (only) done on the people they see (saw) around them, or perhaps the relatively few stories people had in common (national epics or, of course, religious texts).
Obviously this is already true in language – when people want to be dramatic they speak the way they've heard characters in dramatic scenes in films speak – but what about in actions or self-conception? We already talk about people with "main character" syndrome online, but how many others secretly conceive of themselves as the cool, detached, sarky friend (someone like Janeane Garofalo's character in Reality Bites or, God forbid, Chandler Bing). Or how many people play, say, the ingenue, because they aspire to be Holly Golightly or whoever.
It's quite not as simple as seeing someone on TV and mimicking their behaviour; it's fully learning how to embody an entire archetype of a character that exists in different forms in different media, and then modelling your identity on it. Once upon a time, men were encouraged to be Christ-like; now, they're more likely to try to become a sort of blend of Don Draper and Tommy Shelby, yeesh.
I wonder which Messiah archetype Christ was aping. And for that matter which snake sent Judas into his villain era.
Thanks for the bonus stack :) really is practically impossible to measure this stuff (unless you’re Malcom Gladwell and correlation is in fact causation). But if I was going by the anecdotal evidence of attending Spurs games then you’d be spot on and I’d be drowned in a sea of flatcaps.
Anyway, I’ll just be opting out as an overly opinionated NPC.
Tropes are fun!
This reminded me of the collective consciousness reached in Jennifer Egan’s Candy House (the entire human experience reduced to itemised letters and numbers leading to the creation of the ultimate cloud). Potential technological advancements aside this raised some questions about what this type of collective consciousness could mean. Am in agreement we don’t need to desperately seek originality or authenticity (a la Natalie Portman suddenly bursting into dance in Garden State) for a story to be worth telling (god knows I’ve unashamedly enjoyed enough enemies to lovers rom-coms in my time and cannot wait for the next). And perhaps we all just want to be understood and contain the world around us blah blah… But will there be a saturation point, compounded by the internet’s obsession with constantly categorising just about everyone and everything? Maybe there’s a concern, or possible computer bug, we’ll come up against in people becoming overly cognisant of tropes and externalising them to the extent that they start performing tropes and archetypes in their everyday lives. So we lose the space for authenticity?
Before I go off on a tangent about the controlled spaces performing archetypes might be useful (saturnalias and such) my main point I think here is a question of self-fulfilling prophecy and the a post-modern overly-iterative world (see AI services creating text based on previous text and so on). Ergo everything is overly consumed, iterative, inauthentic, and devoid of meaning. Bad. Or maybe it’ll all be chill to be fair.
"Maybe there’s a concern, or possible computer bug, we’ll come up against in people becoming overly cognisant of tropes and externalising them to the extent that they start performing tropes and archetypes in their everyday lives. So we lose the space for authenticity?"
I've always been really interested by this idea, but it's impossible to measure outside of anecdotes and observation. As far as I can tell, essentially everyone already bases their behaviour as much on archetypes from fiction as they must once have (only) done on the people they see (saw) around them, or perhaps the relatively few stories people had in common (national epics or, of course, religious texts).
Obviously this is already true in language – when people want to be dramatic they speak the way they've heard characters in dramatic scenes in films speak – but what about in actions or self-conception? We already talk about people with "main character" syndrome online, but how many others secretly conceive of themselves as the cool, detached, sarky friend (someone like Janeane Garofalo's character in Reality Bites or, God forbid, Chandler Bing). Or how many people play, say, the ingenue, because they aspire to be Holly Golightly or whoever.
It's quite not as simple as seeing someone on TV and mimicking their behaviour; it's fully learning how to embody an entire archetype of a character that exists in different forms in different media, and then modelling your identity on it. Once upon a time, men were encouraged to be Christ-like; now, they're more likely to try to become a sort of blend of Don Draper and Tommy Shelby, yeesh.
I wonder which Messiah archetype Christ was aping. And for that matter which snake sent Judas into his villain era.
Thanks for the bonus stack :) really is practically impossible to measure this stuff (unless you’re Malcom Gladwell and correlation is in fact causation). But if I was going by the anecdotal evidence of attending Spurs games then you’d be spot on and I’d be drowned in a sea of flatcaps.
Anyway, I’ll just be opting out as an overly opinionated NPC.