Disarray

This one is a bit less essay and a bit more chaos than my typical posts; if you don't like the format I can assure you we'll be back on whatever passes for course next week.

I did not, shock of shocks, get chosen as one of the top three entrants in the Spam Fiction contest. Unfortunate and sad, but I had to expect that, really.

Except of course, now the Doubt Monkey is gnawing at my brain, and I am starting to wonder if this piece of post-zombie political fiction I'm working on is at all going to pull its weight. My goal: to grit my teeth and make myself finish this draft so I can pull out the boning knife and the cauter-saw and spend next week making it into something I'm proud of.

Love. Hate. Excess. The words a writer lives by.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the issue of narrowcast culture. Science fiction and fantasy are the genres that are famous for the problem, but every facet of culture has people whose social lives and leisure time, and sometimes even time outside that, entirely revolve around one core concept. Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons are infamous examples, but the same issue crops up with reality shows (one or all of them), professional wrestling, soap operas, etc. etc. For every cultural phenomenon of moderate weight there are people who hang their lives on it: watch the movies, watch the shows, read the books, buy the t-shirts.

None of these things are inherently bad, unless you are concerned about social cache in the world at large, but it's common for these hobbies to become exclusionary: people who read only Star Trek novels and spend their downtime at work practicing Klingon; people who invest massive amounts of money in putting a wrestling ring in their backyard, and whose every conversation contains the phrase "The Rock says". People will focus some or all of their energy toward one single thing, a thing which they did not create and which, while it may enrich their lives, is being spread over far more of their lives than it should reasonably be expected to cover. Narrowcast culture: the rejection of all aspects of the human experience that do not relate to a single, specific concept, generally some set of connected media artifacts.

Personally, I find this repellent. I understand some degree of focus--I am, after all, spending at least some part of the majority of my days writing, and even more of it embroiled in words. But narrowcast cultural thinking is like societal inbreeding; it separates people into groups even moreso than they already are and it snuffs out ideas, ideas with the potential to cause very big change.

What sort of brain finds this acceptable? What sort of person doesn't go exploring, even in their head? I doubt it is that commonly-cited issue of social rejection and subsequent embrace of a sense of belonging, only because people who are part of the "in-crowd" do this, too. I don't think it is low-income people, because plenty of people who don't ever shut off World of Warcraft make sensible and more-than-sensible money as tech workers. Is the need to belong really this strong? Do people really feel so incomplete and scared that they only want to explore along one well-trodden path? People, to my mind, are machines for making ideas; and it bothers me that so many of them, sci-fi nerd and jock alike, are happiest when they are only regurgitating ideas handed to them by others.