“SKAM,” the Radical Teen Drama That Unfolds One Post at a Time
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
>“SKAM Austin” had many hidden layers, and the producers wanted viewers to uncover them all. The characters, some of them played by local teen-agers, all had Instagram accounts, and, like real people’s, the posts offered insights into the characters’ pasts and their hopes for the future. Collectively, the video clips, photographs, and comments imbued the characters with a depth that not even flashbacks provide in conventional TV.
Nobody will accuse me of being cultured let alone cultured in teen drama TV/Netflix series but I know attention to detail when I see it.
The cynic in me though worries that if a TV show can afford to execute like this, what should we expect/fear from state-run psy-ops?
As always, McLuhan’s 4 questions are helpful in thinking about it:
- What does the medium enhance?
- What does the medium make obsolete?
- What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
- What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?
This sort of media feels like a true paradigm shift and is both extremely interesting and terrifying. Terrifying because the boundary between real and manufactured seems to be rapidly dissapearing, and interesting because it truly is a new form of created media.
Across the Scandinavian languages, "skam" mean shame.
The connection to the Norwegian show, seems to be through the director, but what I'm really wondering is, how does the word "Skam" sound to american audiences?
Like scam?
I mean, I don't like social media at all, i only use irc and gnusocial these days, but it seems dishonest and dangerous to use social media as a canvas for fake interactions. Like reality tv in real life. That's not something kids need to be interacting with on social media imo.
“I don’t like $MEDIUM being used this way. Well I don’t like $MEDIUM at all, but it seems dishonest and dangerous to use $MEDIUM as a canvas for fake interactions”
where $MEDIUM can be TV, radio, comic books, etc. That makes it a not so great argument.
(your comment is being downvoted, and I am a big fan of giving grey comments insight in why they might be getting downvoted, so that they have information should they wish to improve their HN submissions)
I don't particularly care what the average HN user thinks of what I post. I post to share my opinion and experience. Most users are twenty-somethings filled with angst and frustration at a world they have no influence over.
It wasn't downvoted at first, but now it is. There's a small group of users that follow my posts around and snipe them. It's whatever. HN doesn't really ""moderate"" content unless you're doing thoughtcrime or bringing attention to some of the censorship here.
Anyways, Facebook is an interactive medium. It's not the same as TV or movies or music, it intrinsically carries a responsibility to maintain what users are shown. Sort of like a TV channel,and by this I mean the people that determine what is broadcasted. If natgeo suddenly stopped showing educational content and started shoveling drivel, the audience could just leave. (Bad example, since they DO shovel garbage on natgeo now... )
Facebook is not generally understood as an instrument of advertisement the way it really is. The same as google. The veneer of "I can message my friends and see photos of their food" is enough to fool most users. This is especially heinous with kids, since they are much more impressionable and I think that demands an obligation to do what it takes to keep them safe and help them avoid content that is not healthy for them, and also to help them learn to moderate their content towards that same goal.
Kids these days aren't as critical of what they consume. Now, there's eons of people complaining about "kids these days", and like everybody else, I never thought I'd be one of those people but I guess it's just societal upkeep to do it. Anyways, kids are not as perceptive as industry veterans when they are being manipulated. It's like New Coke. I've seen the world change and people change WITH the world. The new world seems to be about how much you consume, and not the what or the why of the consumption.
Anyways thanks, I guess? Your comment kinda has that snarky "go fuck yourself"-but-in-a-pseudo-friendly tone feel to it. Perfect example of HN's weird echoey self-contained culture.
I'm sure some of this familiar.
These are not valuable attributes in opinions. These are people who could be replaced by one another, theres no utility or really anything redeeming about any one of them in particular.
Like I said, I post to share a 25+yr career's worth of experience, not to hear little kids tell me how to be snarky online. That's literally one of the most pathetic things I've ever heard.
HN should abandon it's weird pseudomarxist ideals of self-moderation/conversation and maybe talk about computers for a change.