About online wrongness

The Oxford Word of the Year is “rage bait”, defined as: 

online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.

But I’m trying to be less consumed with rage these days, even if recent events feel designed to provoke it: analogue rage bait, if you like. What I do notice instead, among all the AI capybaras is stuff that appears engineered to induce a bit of mild eye-rolling, a sigh, an outburst of pedantry; that time when an exasperated parent loses patience and says, “never mind, let me do it.” It’s a variant of Cunningham’s Law, which holds that “the best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer”. Except that nobody cares about getting the right answer as long as they get those eyeballs.

The whole issue is confused by the lurking presence of AI; are these cynical attempts to engage with wrongness, or just bots swallowing up online dumbness and spitting it out again? For example, this list of the best ever Test batters, which starts OK, then descends into increasingly hearty portions of word soup. It looks like AI slop, put out there to provoke – but then we recall the Japanese Nintendo game that was peopled with bizarrely-named baseball players, all without the assistance of AI. Might Gariel Btogby not be a distant cousin to Bobson Dugnutt?

And then we see posts like this, claiming to be a video of “Jingle Bells in Indian” which is nonsensical because there’s no such language as Indian, and in any case the song being massacred is ‘Sleigh Ride’. Pedant bait? Well, not really, because someone who points out the solecism is slagged off for being a killjoy Karen. This was a post born of slack-jawed ignorance, pure and simple, and it’s bad manners to mention it. To be honest, why do we need digitally-generated stupidity when we have the real thing?

About James

From James, by Percival Everett, which is a reworking of Huckleberry Finn, which I haven’t read, so I don’t know if something similar occurs in the original book, which is rather appropriate:

...I don’t think he ever read no books, but he acted like the sort of man what reads books. You know what I mean?

And later, when the central (black) character blacks up to join a minstrel show:

What would they have done to you if they had figured out that you were exactly what you were pretending to be?

About Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry has died. You may not be able to place the name, let alone fit a face to it, but you know the buildings, the ones that look like a stack of imploding loo rolls, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Dancing House in Prague, the residential add-ons at our very own Battersea Power Station, beggin’ yer pardon, guvnor.

Not in the mind of a Daily Mail sub, though. In that strange, empty space, Gehry’s not an architect. He’s “Brad Pitt’s architect friend”.  And, look, a rock star employed him, and another actor wrote something. So he must be important. And moreover, the two actors and the musician require no clarification, but we need to have it explained to us that Gehry was an architect. Although if you need that level of explanation, why would you even care that he died?

About television

I was recently getting a bit self-indulgent about how blogging used to be a community but now feels like howling into the wind. Which I guess says something about its place in the continuum of massive leaps in communication technology that were identified as a big threat to existing formats, only to die in their own right (see faxes, BlackBerry, MiniDiscs, VHS, smoke signals and more). One of the victims of the social media onrush, or so we are told, was the notion of TV as a collective experience, the whole Morecambe-and-Wise-Christmas-Show meme, watercooler moments even before offices has watercoolers. It was best expressed during my brief, inglorious stint teaching secondary school English, when I asked a bunch of 13-year-olds what TV or movie they liked and one girl declared flatly that the only thing she liked was “stuff on my phone”.

But maybe announcements about the death of TV are premature. After all the basic grammar of the stuff on her phone (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram etc) is as much TV as anything else, albeit truncated and bastardised. As Derek Thompson recently observed: 

Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.

I guess the only real change we have to countenance is that McLuhan’s characterisation of TV as cool media, in that it required the audience’s active participation to fill in the informational gaps, is now pretty passé. Nowadays it feels as if active participation, beyond an occasional tired swipe, is the last thing anyone – by which I mean the people who put the stuff out there – wants. Howling into the wind again.

About Stoppard

Reaching through the cigarette fug to rescue the best zingers among the tributes to Tom Stoppard, I find this, from a touching piece by Patrick Marber:

I like cliches! I use them often. With my work it helps for the audience to know where they are now and then.

PS: An earlier ponder from the great man on the accessibility or otherwise of his works; and less than a year ago, the critic who described one of his plays as intellectual masturbation, to which the only feasible response is, “you say that like it’s a bad thing.”

PPS: And just before I publish, I hear Marber describe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as “showy-offy”, which misses the point even harder.

PPPS: And of course this letter, which has gone viral, or metastatic, or chaotic, or something: