[P2P-F] Fwd: Aaron Sorkin's Dilemma, or How Digital Media Killed Hero's Journey

Wed Nov 4 19:21:53 CET 2015

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 10:46 PM
Subject: Aaron Sorkin's Dilemma, or How Digital Media Killed Hero's Journey
To: rushkoff at simplelists.com

Happy Wednesday,

I've been spending my evenings watching the Mets (lose) instead of
attending to communications. Emails have piled up, Twitter notifications
sit unread, and LinkedIn has gone into a higher level of robo-Defcon
notifications no doubt triggered by my statistically alarming lack of
activity.

I have been writing a lot, though. I also corrected the final galleys for
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and collected some gratifyingly
enthusiastic blurbs from people who are under no obligation to deliver
false praise. And that means a lot to me. (Yes, you can pre-order if you're
so inclined:
http://www.amazon.com/Throwing-Rocks-Google-Bus-Prosperity/dp/1617230170 )

I started a new column at Digital Trends - an website that does mostly
technology reviews - but I'll be doing reviews of technology itself. Some
favorite members of my posse will be joining me there, including Dave
Weinberger, David Zweig, and maybe even David Pescovitz. I banged out my
first piece last week and pasted it below - but you can read a prettier
version with video here:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/how-technology-has-dulled-our-taste-for-tall-tales/

Meanwhile, I'll be speaking at next week's Platform Cooperativism
conference at the New School. http://platformcoop.net (I'm on the evening
of Nov 14, with Astra Taylor. My new friend, Political Economist and Chair
of Media Studies at Queens College, Rick Maxwell, will be speaking there,
too.) It'll be a great gathering of people who understand how the digital
economy has exacerbated the worst of corporate capitalism, as well as how
to reconfigure the economy for way more distributed wealth creation. The
irony is that what we're asking for is actually good for business, even
though they fight against these principles at every turn.

Okay - gotta run to teach my class and then do a talk at SUNY Purchase
tonight, about Generation Like. I think it's open to the public, so come if
you can:
https://newmedia.purchase.edu/new-media-lecture-series-douglas-rushkoff/
--

You Can't Handle The Truth

Digital culture seems up in arms about the ways the new Steve Jobs movie
diverges from factual history. Unlike the film, nothing ever failed in an
Apple demo, Jobs didn’t get into fights with people before going on stage,
Wozniak never said any of the things his character does in the movie, and
engineers simply don’t work and speak the way they do in the movie.

For people who knew Jobs or Apple well – or have even read Walter
Isaacson’s book – the poetic license taken by the film feels like an
inaccuracy being entered into the historical record. In that sense, it’s
worse than a time-travel inconsistency in the Star Trek universe.

But is that really why people are so disturbed? Biopics have always taken
liberties with real lives of their subjects; the dismay over this fictional
take on the Jobs legend rivals the hoopla over a lustful Jesus in
Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ.  Something else is going on: We’re
dissatisfied with how movies work, because digital media has rendered them
– or at least the way they tell stories — obsolete.
Bedtime tales

Aaron Sorkin is probably our best living cinematic storyteller. In full
disclosure, I grew up with the guy, directed him in high school musicals
like Pippin and Charlie Brown, and sat next to him in the American History
class where he got the idea for A Few Good Men. I really do love him and
respect his work.

But there’s something about his writing that has always struck me as, well,
almost too perfectly theatrical. The stories in his TV shows and movies are
impeccably engineered to set up conflicts that conspire to bring out the
precise inner flaws of each character involved. Superhuman dialogue –
everyone has the perfect thing to say in every scene – increases the stakes
until we reach an emotionally cathartic resolution that is both unexpected
yet – in retrospect – inevitable. Sorkin is today’s master of Aristotelian
narrative, that beginning, middle, and ending in which a character and his
or her entire world descend into chaos then just come together, make
absolute sense, and make us cry. It’s why we love such stories. Or did.

Because the real world just isn’t tidy like that. Conflicts don’t resolve;
they linger and fester. Like terrorism or global warming. In real life
there’s almost never a sigh of ultimate relief. The cathartic
self-knowledge of the sort depicted at the end of every perfect drama
doesn’t even happen in the shrink’s office, much less the night before a
trial (A Few Good Men), an election (An American President) or an iPhone
demo.

At best, good drama of this sort is escapist. It gives us a way to see life
the way we’d like it to be: Justice prevails, evildoers get their
comeuppance, and honor is rewarded. Sorkin shows like The West Wing or The
Newsroom succeed not because they show us what those environments are
really like, but because they show us what they should be like. In stark
contrast to the calamity defining George W’s tenure, we get President
Martin Sheen on a heroic journey on par with Shakespeare’s Henry V.  While
the ratings-driven newsmedia boggles the Gulf War and misreports elections
in progress, The Newsroom was an homage to journalistic ethics and
integrity trumping ratings and profit.

But these worlds must be depicted this way in order for them to serve as
the perfect engines for heroic drama of a very particular type. They are
shot in a photorealistic style, but they are backdrops for the classical
well-made play.

As Sorkin recently told Wired, he is not really a screenwriter, but a
“playwright who pretends to be a screenwriter.” What he may not fully
realize is that this makes him not just one, but two full media revolutions
behind the times. We are living in a digital-media universe, where the
rules of drama described by Aristotle 2,000 years ago no longer hold.

For decades now, interactive media devices, from the remote control and the
VCR to Netflix and the DVR have changed our relationship to filmed stories.
If we don’t believe something, we can change the channel. If we don’t
understand something, we can pause and go back. We have a freedom we
couldn’t enjoy as live broadcast viewers – much less as movie theater
goers. We don’t have to sit through the rising tension, the plot twists, or
the frustration of the protagonist unless we want to. We can watch three
shows at once, cutting back and forth between them as TV operators rather
than as mere TV viewers. We watch movies on YouTube, less as immersed
audience members than as distanced critics.

That’s why traditional sitcoms and hour dramas with weekly happy endings
gave way to stories broken up into lots of little pieces, or serialized
over years. The Simpsons was written for the channel surfer. We don’t care
about whether Homer gets out of the nuclear power plant before it blows up;
we are watching the show scene by scene, trying to recognize which
commercial, movie, or other show is being satirized. It’s like Mystery
Science Theater 3000, where the satisfaction comes not from getting to the
end, but getting the reference. The implied hyperlink.

Meanwhile, premium channels like HBO are filled with shows that don’t ever
really resolve. We don’t watch Game of Thrones to see who is going to win
the war, but to watch the game in progress. Look at the opening titles over
a map of the seven kingdoms: It may as well be a fantasy role-playing game
or World of Warcraft. The object of such a game isn’t to win, because that
ends the play. It’s to keep the game going.

Likewise, our real lives in the digital era have become less traditionally
structured. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman tells us to dispense with the
notion of a career, and to think in terms of 18-month gigs and a constant
search for new opportunities. You never get to the promised land. There is
no end. The only ones still left hawking a story with an ending are VCs
pushing the millionaire-minting “exit potential” of their startups – and,
thanks to Mike Judge’s show Silicon Valley, most of us are coming to
realize what malarkey that turns out to be, too.

The truth is, we have outgrown the kinds of bedtime stories that have
placated us and assuaged our anxiety for centuries. We don’t need the
contrived resolution of Mark Zuckerberg sending a friend request to his
ex-girlfriend at the end of Social Network, or the emotional catharsis of
Steve Jobs forging a relationship with the daughter he neglected.

Besides, our digital technologies and the sensibilities they foster have
made us less likely to want to watch someone else’s story than to
experience our own in a video game. When we do turn to media today, it is
less likely in order to hear some story than to check a fact. In this age
of transparency, we want to know what’s really going on.

To Sorkin’s credit, it was the villain in his first great play who argued
that we “can’t handle the truth.” Reality, Jack Nicholson’s character
explained, is just too messy, too dirty, too violent for us innocents to
behold. We require pretty stories.

But as members of the digital generation, we have learned to interact with
the worlds behind the screen. We have become the masters of the most
powerful technologies humankind has ever known, and eaten from the tree of
the knowledge. Indeed, we have bitten into the apple.

And for that, we have the real Steve Jobs to thank.

Read more:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/how-technology-has-dulled-our-taste-for-tall-tales/#ixzz3qXPfK1zk

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