Everyday we are surrounded by voices shouting at the top of their lungs for our attention, from social media to news outlets to our friends and family and our favorite books. Any marketing major could lay out for you all the sources of media that want our attention. There is just so much content on the internet and we keep making more. So I’m going to talk about that and join the choir of voices currently trying to get some of your focus and time.
First, we have something that is known as a read-write culture; that is to say a culture that both produces and consumes vast quantities of literature or other storytelling media. We also have the ultimate copy machine, the internet, and a propensity towards remixing whatever content we enjoy or thing that could be improved. Think parodies and remakes, or literally any of the classic Disney movies. Yes, those are all remixes of source material. Humans are hungry for adaptations. We are naturally creative beings.
People can make whole carriers out of making things up. Comedians, Musicians, Traditional and/or Digital Artists, Poets and Authors. Humans take an idea, apply effort and time and make something out of it that other humans enjoy and can even get obsessed over. Take George Hartman as a recent example. People got so invested in the show he makes with his team of other individuals that when McDonald’s brought back a limited supply of the szechuan sauce that a fictional character Hartman created is addicted to, the stores were stormed by fans and quickly sold out. This is the power of fictional media in our lives. Anyone who has ever been part of a fanbase for anything can tell you all about this kind of thing. If you have even heard of Comic Con in your lifetime, you’ve already been touched by the superpower that is fan-driven media.
There are so many possible answer to the question of “why,” each stemming from a different philosophy or ideology that to go through all of them faithfully and completely could take weeks. Humans that study how the human mind works spend their entire lives trying to figure us out and we still don’t have a perfect answer. And when you think about it, science as a school of knowing was started by people observing the world around them and thinking up laws that would explain why what happened happened. Everything we do is creative and everyone thinks differently; everyone has a voice, they want to be heard, and now more than ever before we have a way of hearing everyone. Now we need to come up with a better way of sorting through the voices.