Category: Personal

“Media Rating Sites” and Living for Art

For quite some time, I’ve been very invested in a particular kind of website (I’m calling them “media rating sites”) that allows you to find books, albums, tv shows etc. that you’ve seen and assign them a rating based on your enjoyment of them. Goodreads is a familiar example of this, and I also frequent RateYourMusic and MyAnimeList. Each of these sites have millions of users and their main function is to allow you to catalogue everything you read/watch/listen to and even organize them in terms of your opinion of them. The latter two are also very helpful in helping users find quality content, as they compile the collective ratings of all users to generate lists of what the community deems the best albums and shows, respectively. RateYourMusic shines in particular here, as you can even narrow the lists to specific genres and/or time periods you might be interested in. I think these websites are excellent tools for avid fans of any of these hobbies but I’ve also become increasingly curious about how this type of  routine of logging the things we use to pass the time might influence my lifestyle habits and the attitudes I bring to the pastimes.

I think the most obvious impact of using these sights is that they make much more prevalent the sense of accomplishment we get from gaining a working knowledge of a genre or medium. To be sure, there’s nothing new about taking pride in being “well-read” but I think being able to refer back to your lifetime history of books read changes the equation. It becomes quantitative and, should a user take advantage of the social media dimension of these sights, they can see whom among their friends has read the most. And, even as someone who doesn’t use these features, I still feel a small burst of pleasure as I see my number of episodes viewed uptick, almost as though I were reaching for a high score in an arcade game.

How should I feel about this? Is this a case in which I should doubt the satisfaction I’m getting, feeling suspicious about how such an irrational pleasure deteriorates my mind? Even before using sites like these, I still found a sense of purpose in exploring different art forms and varieties of expression. I’m an ex-literature major after all, so I shouldn’t begrudge myself the joy of learning about art just because I’m not in school now. However, this seems like a very charitable way to describe sitting in my boxers watching Dragon Ball Z filler at 2am. Not to unduly disparage Dragon Ball, it certainly has its place in the history of pop culture, but I think permitting any and all time spent watching anime, listening to music, or reading to count as meaningful time, regardless of the quality of my experience, dangerously muddies one’s sense of what time well spent should feel like.

I don’t regret budgeting a lot of time for the things that I enjoy, but it’s important that I not let my viewing habits become perfunctory. If spending time with art is worthwhile, that’s because it gives you a new experience or allows you to think about a given subject in a new way. And I think these websites can help me do those things exactly, provided that I don’t permit my desire to have knowledge about the things I enjoy get in the way of my actual enjoyment of them. When I’m partially motivated by the desire to boost my profile by racking up new albums, it’s easy to tune out or pay due attention to what I’m listening to because, in the end, I still get to count that album. The crucial difference between listening carefully and mindlessly flooding my subconscious with sound becomes lost in the course of this activity. Too many times have I been asked whether I’ve heard a particular album and felt embarrassment that I hadn’t or, worse yet, actually pretended that I had. I still feel the appeal of establishing myself as a knowledgeable connoisseur of different art forms, but when my eagerness to achieve that status undermines my actual appreciation of what I consume, that’s when all those hours logged in front of the television screen really start to look sad.

Ideally, I’ll grow out of my phase of running through “the canon” as quickly as possible and, instead, find a more deliberate way of approaching my experience of art. There’s certainly value in familiarizing myself with genres and understanding what makes the great works great, but that should ultimately be mere preparation for finding works of art that satisfy the curiosities and questions that I find on my own, rather than simply running the gamut of everything that has met critical acclaim. As it stands, I hesitate even to reread books that I love on the grounds that there’s still so much that I haven’t read yet, and while new books obviously have their own charm, the attitude of trying to read everything that the cumulative sights like Goodreads can encourage, for a young, aspiring intellectual like myself, fosters an impulse to put the appearance of knowledge and sophistication above the earnest search for wisdom that should be art’s main purpose.

None of this is to say that I plan to abandon these websites or to drastically reduce my time spent on them. On the contrary, I still believe them to be invaluable resources for connecting myself with new media in which I may take an interest. I’ll even continue rating things and maintaining my catalogue, if only to exert my small vector of influence on the overall ratings for each piece. I already see the futility in commending myself for boosting my numbers on any of these platforms, and so all that need be prescribed is intermittent reminders to take time with art and allow it to be for me what was intended. If I do that, I’m certain to take more and more lessons from those wiser than me and then, rather than living for art, I can find out how properly to live with it.

 

Why’s and How’s

So for my first real post, I want to take some time to think about what it is that I’m doing and why I think this will be a worthwhile pastime for me. As I said in my introductory post a few days ago, I envision these blog posts to be personal writing and thinking exercises to help me make deeper, more coherent sense of my thoughts. I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I’m doing and seeing, and I consider it a joy but, that being said, I think putting those inchoate thoughts into complete sentences will be much more rewarding than just having the impressions of a thought materialize and fade away without receiving the concentration they deserve.

I’ll primarily be writing about arts and humanities and the take-away’s that make them worthwhile for me. While I’ll certainly evaluate the different media I’m writing about, I want to be really clear that these aren’t reviews. I think that reviews are a tad more indulgent than the type of reflection that I want to do. I don’t think that anyone should really care about my opinion too much and reviews, to me, seem to carry an implicit stance of “I think this thing is good/bad for the following reasons and you should agree.” Most of the time a review hinges on someone agreeing with the stated opinion or accepting the reviewer as a credible authority on the art form in question.

I want to do something more along the lines of interpretation and I think the critical difference is that I’ll be trying to bring out an interesting aspect of a show or book that will enrich other people’s experience of it, should they keep my observations in mind. So my writing will normally be complementary in like manner to a positive review, but I hope to be able to offer some modest advice on how to read/watch something rather than assessing whether something is worth the effort. That’s what good criticism should do–the value of writing about art should be apparent from the depths of experience it enables, not from the language one uses to laud or excoriate the work of another person.

I hope that writing will be a good creative outlet for me and help me continue to enjoy critical thinking and reflection now that I don’t have an academic environment demanding that of me. I also think that, when I choose to write about more personal subjects, that the concerted act of writing and forcing out an expression of something will help me be more in touch with myself and the different people and things in my life. While giving advice on how to properly write a paper, a professor of mine once said that when you run up against a thought or idea that you can’t quite put into words, that’s the place you need to press up against and return again and again until it comes out. That’s a sign of an underlying something that’s probably deeper and more interesting than the first round of ideas to pop into our heads. Normally the best way to do access those elusive ideas is just to write. You’ll inevitably, miss the mark at first, but every stage of writing is productive for the mind, and so persistence will eventually be rewarded with that nugget of insight you knew was there.

And not only do I think writing as an exercise can resolve a conceptual block like in philosophy class, I also think that personal writing can tease out dormant emotions. It would require, and I know this image is almost contradictory, but it would require an almost machine-like commitment to catharsis to discharge one’s underlying emotions as often as we should. I can only speak for myself, but I think a lot of us carry an unbelievable tension within ourselves that we’re almost not conscious of. We often lack the time and energy needed to prioritize our emotional well-being and so I hope that beginning to write habitually and perhaps mindlessly like this will allow me to address what’s going on with me a little more often. It’s true that my thoughts will probably just be about anime to begin with, but, the way I see it, making a habit of externalizing thoughts and ideas can only steer me in the right direction.

I think I’ll end with a word about the title I’ve chosen for my blog: Insights & Outsights. I offer this so that I can partially exculpate myself the accusation that I consider myself to be a uniquely insightful person or any such pretensions. I do want to try to capture the unique ideas I have about the things I do and see just because I do enjoy analyzing things, hence the “Insights,” but I also want “Outsights” to have some significance aside from this play on words. Rather than posturing as someone who can penetrate to the deeper significance of things, I would rather exhibit a kind of curiosity through what I write, an “out-sight” being an experience of something outside of my usual frame or reference. I’m in the middle of such an experience now teaching in Macau, and I hope I can maintain the humility to continue seeing things as new and respecting their uniqueness as such even after I return to the Midwest. I hope to think well and express my ideas, but never value them so highly that I forget to credit the astounding world around me that never runs out of this food for thought.