Why this stuff matters
Jul. 31st, 2007 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethEnglish, I mean. Cultural studies. Media and representation and the use of signs and words.
Because it's what makes us human.
The way we look at the world around us and try and turn it into stories, use narrative as a tool to predict and explain, look at the world and think it *means something* - that's human.
And we construct how to be human out of the stories we tell ourselves. Our names, our places, they aren't just labels, they're long and ongoing stories that we become part of and write with our every action. Our understanding of those stories shapes our actions on fundamental and unconscious levels. We figure out what is good to do, what is common sense, and we pass it on, and push it around, and complain about the bits that stick out and bump into people and the ways it doesn't fit, and then figure out a new version. It's what makes us people.
So all these stories we complain about, the ones where one group of people get the short end and another get all the shiny - that matters. Not because television tells us how to think - studies say that for things within our lived experience the people we meet have the most influence, the things we've actually done and the talking we've done with people that help form our opinions. But for things *outside* our lived experience? We have to fill in the gaps from somewhere. And that's where media comes in. All those stories, telling us how to think about the stuff we haven't stepped in yet.
Stories are the maps, the pathfinders, the seeking out part of us. We got take a thought for a wander and see what kind of a world we end up with. Then we set out to build it.
Do you want to build a comic book world?
Not so very.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't tell those stories, because the *other* thing we do with stories is sort out where we *don't* want to step.
But... if we're showing people steping on other people and getting the shiny because of it? If people in stories are getting rewards for acting in ways that put other people down? Where's the thing that tells people that the world doesn't work that way?
*waves hello*
That would be us. People reading and writing *about* the stories, who step up and say this is unacceptable.
Because - and this part scares me whenever I bump into it - some people that don't get told? Actually still don't know.
Point of fact, some people that are told still don't know. Those ones scare me worse.
You know that bit on Buffy when the geek trio have that girl in the basement and she tells them what they're doing is rape (or she should, as long as you weren't watching on the BBC, I read) and they act like that never occured to them? Maybe that didn't seem very realistic. Surely they'd have known? Then I ran a little poll about Torchwood, and some people said they thought that drugging people to get sex was perfectly okay. And... where the fuck did they get that idea? And how do we change it? Because they need telling like seriously, and fast.
When I studied Sociology on Access I was left thinking that it should be a compulsory subject. We should learn it right alongside history in school. Because it was so much of a surprise to so many people that all those inequalities were still there. My mum didn't believe that women still get paid less, because after all, isn't there a law against it? Well there's a law against it because people keep breaking the law and that needs fixing. Women get paid less. And there's other things, stuff that leaves me jaw dropped that I still live in this world and didn't know it, like how reports of crimes in a national crime survey were being ignored after the first five incidents a year. Because somebody sometime had decided that nobody gets beaten up more than five times a year. Even if they're talking domestic abuse. There's all this *invisible* shit, and shouldn't there be someone doing the telling of it?
There's whole groups of invisible *people*. I read a report on representation of disabled people on TV and a ridiculous proportion of the appearances they counted was because of one blind man who was in government and hence on the news a lot. Mostly disabled people aren't on TV. And there's a *lot* of us. More than I'd suspected. I mean, I knew there were a lot more disabled people in my world than on TV, but wasn't that because of where I hang out? Well, no, actually, it's just because there's a ton more people with disabilities in the world than on TV, by percents. And that *matters*. Because if you're living your one small little life then you only have the things that have happened to you so far to draw on. But stories are how you can live the accumulated experience of humanity. People who walked that territory already - or rolled over it, or whatever - can tell you actually it is passable, if you try. And there's times you really need to hear that.
There's other kinds of stories we really don't need to hear again. You heard the one about the evil-insane-dead-queer person? No? Then please tell me where you've been hanging out, because I'd like to avoid that one. I mean I can understand it when the subtext was on purpose, when it was the kind of morality tale that says if you love the wrong kind of people you come to a bad end. I'll never agree with it, but I can understand it. But then the same damn story gets told by people who would *never* consciously agree with that moral, and how does that happen?
Maybe because they'd seen the story before?
Maybe because the bad stories get into your head in the dark places, and you have to dig them up and shine a light on them to see where the bad stuff lives.
There's some bad structures out there. The playing field is not only not level, it has one end trying to be a black hole. And those structures hang out in the stories, live in people's heads, get embedded in the language and hide out in connotations on particular words.
And everything we ever say, see, hear, communicate, every story in our lives, adds to all of that. It can add to the bad old patterns, or it can help build new ones. But it's always doing one or the other (and usually bits of both). And if we don't keep an eye on it then we'll just end up tripping over whatever we build with our eyes closed.
Stories are experience without experience, they're the map to the dark places behind the eyes, they're the record and revelation of us.
So it matters, this thing we do here of poking the stories and turning them over and making them our own. It matters enough to kick in the logic and reason and pull things apart with the text tools college tries to give us. It matters enough to get passionately emotional.
It matters because we're people, and this is how.
Because it's what makes us human.
The way we look at the world around us and try and turn it into stories, use narrative as a tool to predict and explain, look at the world and think it *means something* - that's human.
And we construct how to be human out of the stories we tell ourselves. Our names, our places, they aren't just labels, they're long and ongoing stories that we become part of and write with our every action. Our understanding of those stories shapes our actions on fundamental and unconscious levels. We figure out what is good to do, what is common sense, and we pass it on, and push it around, and complain about the bits that stick out and bump into people and the ways it doesn't fit, and then figure out a new version. It's what makes us people.
So all these stories we complain about, the ones where one group of people get the short end and another get all the shiny - that matters. Not because television tells us how to think - studies say that for things within our lived experience the people we meet have the most influence, the things we've actually done and the talking we've done with people that help form our opinions. But for things *outside* our lived experience? We have to fill in the gaps from somewhere. And that's where media comes in. All those stories, telling us how to think about the stuff we haven't stepped in yet.
Stories are the maps, the pathfinders, the seeking out part of us. We got take a thought for a wander and see what kind of a world we end up with. Then we set out to build it.
Do you want to build a comic book world?
Not so very.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't tell those stories, because the *other* thing we do with stories is sort out where we *don't* want to step.
But... if we're showing people steping on other people and getting the shiny because of it? If people in stories are getting rewards for acting in ways that put other people down? Where's the thing that tells people that the world doesn't work that way?
*waves hello*
That would be us. People reading and writing *about* the stories, who step up and say this is unacceptable.
Because - and this part scares me whenever I bump into it - some people that don't get told? Actually still don't know.
Point of fact, some people that are told still don't know. Those ones scare me worse.
You know that bit on Buffy when the geek trio have that girl in the basement and she tells them what they're doing is rape (or she should, as long as you weren't watching on the BBC, I read) and they act like that never occured to them? Maybe that didn't seem very realistic. Surely they'd have known? Then I ran a little poll about Torchwood, and some people said they thought that drugging people to get sex was perfectly okay. And... where the fuck did they get that idea? And how do we change it? Because they need telling like seriously, and fast.
When I studied Sociology on Access I was left thinking that it should be a compulsory subject. We should learn it right alongside history in school. Because it was so much of a surprise to so many people that all those inequalities were still there. My mum didn't believe that women still get paid less, because after all, isn't there a law against it? Well there's a law against it because people keep breaking the law and that needs fixing. Women get paid less. And there's other things, stuff that leaves me jaw dropped that I still live in this world and didn't know it, like how reports of crimes in a national crime survey were being ignored after the first five incidents a year. Because somebody sometime had decided that nobody gets beaten up more than five times a year. Even if they're talking domestic abuse. There's all this *invisible* shit, and shouldn't there be someone doing the telling of it?
There's whole groups of invisible *people*. I read a report on representation of disabled people on TV and a ridiculous proportion of the appearances they counted was because of one blind man who was in government and hence on the news a lot. Mostly disabled people aren't on TV. And there's a *lot* of us. More than I'd suspected. I mean, I knew there were a lot more disabled people in my world than on TV, but wasn't that because of where I hang out? Well, no, actually, it's just because there's a ton more people with disabilities in the world than on TV, by percents. And that *matters*. Because if you're living your one small little life then you only have the things that have happened to you so far to draw on. But stories are how you can live the accumulated experience of humanity. People who walked that territory already - or rolled over it, or whatever - can tell you actually it is passable, if you try. And there's times you really need to hear that.
There's other kinds of stories we really don't need to hear again. You heard the one about the evil-insane-dead-queer person? No? Then please tell me where you've been hanging out, because I'd like to avoid that one. I mean I can understand it when the subtext was on purpose, when it was the kind of morality tale that says if you love the wrong kind of people you come to a bad end. I'll never agree with it, but I can understand it. But then the same damn story gets told by people who would *never* consciously agree with that moral, and how does that happen?
Maybe because they'd seen the story before?
Maybe because the bad stories get into your head in the dark places, and you have to dig them up and shine a light on them to see where the bad stuff lives.
There's some bad structures out there. The playing field is not only not level, it has one end trying to be a black hole. And those structures hang out in the stories, live in people's heads, get embedded in the language and hide out in connotations on particular words.
And everything we ever say, see, hear, communicate, every story in our lives, adds to all of that. It can add to the bad old patterns, or it can help build new ones. But it's always doing one or the other (and usually bits of both). And if we don't keep an eye on it then we'll just end up tripping over whatever we build with our eyes closed.
Stories are experience without experience, they're the map to the dark places behind the eyes, they're the record and revelation of us.
So it matters, this thing we do here of poking the stories and turning them over and making them our own. It matters enough to kick in the logic and reason and pull things apart with the text tools college tries to give us. It matters enough to get passionately emotional.
It matters because we're people, and this is how.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-31 05:36 pm (UTC)a) the knowledge I'm spending the next five years doing my English degree, and the shadow cast by the biiiiiig stack of books involved
and
b) seeing the same stupid argument again and again and again, and having some guy turn up in my LJ to be just as clueless all over again.
The *other* thing stories do real well is keep it *interesting* - you can have the argument only so many ways, but you can write the stories drawn from it in more ways than there are people.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-02 09:56 pm (UTC)"I would dower you with experience, without experience."
... don't quite remember if the behind the eyes bit is quote or inspiration, but I think it's PTerry and the one with the rats. Shall have to go re-read.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 09:08 pm (UTC)Very nicely put! This is precisely why I get upset with writers who have obviously done no research on a place or demographic and are simply filling in any blanks with what popular culture has told them about that place or group. They're perpetuating myths, many of which are quite harmful, that will never be disproved mostly because the majority of their audience will never have any experience of that place or group other than what media and pop culture has fed to them. It irritates me, and also shames me to a certain degree, because I feel that as a writer, I'm part of a group that's supposed to share and spread *real* experiences. To know that this is not always the case...headache. Major, massive headache.
In fact, I think I need some aspirin right now. Not because of what you've written. It's lovely. Unfortunately, it's reminding me of how many people with pens don't truly appreciate what you've said.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-02 09:41 pm (UTC)... I should probably look it up an dlink-reference it actually...
writers who recycle things unexamined don't tend to add much to it, imho. is sad and frequently annoying.
flip side, if I only write about my own 'real' experiences... I'm pretty much talking about my four walls and some college lessons. Making stuff up FTW!
no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 10:54 pm (UTC)This is beautifully put; your whole entry is. Thank you for this.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-04 09:23 am (UTC)