Viewers vs. Doers: The Rise of Spectatoritis
artofmanliness.com
artofmanliness.com
Living vicariously is the essence of being human. It's why we have language, and stories, and imagination, and all the wetware required to support these things. Dogs can't tell stories about other dogs in such a way that their canine audience is moved to weep or cheer. Whereas humans line up to hear stories about three-thousand-year-old semi-mythical events. Then they draw practical conclusions from those stories.
I don't see why it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself. We have no shortage of deep-sea fishermen -- in fact, what we have is a shortage of fish. And the same principle definitely applies to soldiers: Every real soldier who can be replaced by a Team Fortress player, or a History Channel viewer, represents a net win for humanity.
There are men who feel that the entire problem with males today is that they’re
too obsessed with college and professional sports. But that’s as wrong-headed
as thinking that indulging in a straight diet of passive entertainment carries
no ill-effects whatsoever. Rather than suffering from spectatoritis, these men
are inflicted by high-horse-itis.
I'm a fourth year undergraduate at a university in Boston, MA. I have had roommates who watch television many hours a day, do their homework with no passion or interest, and then proceed to drink and party all night. I will not argue that any of these actions are individually "bad," but I will argue that a life consisting primarily of these activities is devoid of creative output and is qualitatively "bad" under my philosophy.
A life of raging all night at a party and, assuming an impressive alcohol tolerance, waking the next morning to start creating something is not a a life I'd call "bad."
I believe this is a faithful interpetation of the article's position.
I think this is the exact point the author is trying to disprove. The articles isn't saying that all viewing activities are bad, in fact he point out the "high-horse-ness" of people who say they are. Instead he is saying that the essence of being human is in being in the area, not passively viewing it.
While there is much to learn from watching, reading, ect, real life takes place when you are the doer, not the viewer. Teddy Roosevelt's very famous "It's not the critic that counts" speech (Full Version: http://www.leadershipnow.com/tr-citizenship.html ) comes to mind instantly.
While History is the study of things that you will never be able to do, it is immensely valuable, if that knowledge can be translated into ideas about what we should do. Winston Churchill was a student of history, and his life was meaningful because he acted on this knowledge to stop the German advance and save the free world.
You are right about the fisherman-soldier analogy. But I think the article's main point is that creators (read doers) are of much more value to society then consumers (read viewers).
This is why we should have "One thing in which [we are] a doer, and not just a viewer."
There is a big difference between the mentality of the creator and the consumer. This should not be news.
Hacker News, exists, in part, as a monument to creating.
At this point, I thought it was a forgone, forknown point, especially here, that being a creating being is better than a consuming being.
It's important to separate the ethical, technical, and business concerns and look at them one by one.
iOS offers me a few things. As a user, it offers me a smooth widget experience, no hard crashes, and a ginormous store full of toys and a few useful widgets. As an appliance, it is sterling. My music player works as reliably as my toaster. Exactly what I want, actually. I have no need to tinker with my appliances; they do exactly what I want, and I free my mental cycles to do things like work on my Master's without fiddling around with configuring my toaster. As a developer, it offers me a simple delivery platform, delivered to people with spare cash who have been trained to purchase software. It's a pretty sweet gig, in my opinion.
Apple really should open up the hood to tinkerers, in the ethical sense. It does us as a society no good to have a society of 'couch potatoes' and spectators. We need doers & thinkers, people who can get the job done and also reflect on their existence. I strongly believe that Apple should incorporate that awareness into product policies: there should be something like a 'enable tinkerer mode' in my iPod system settings. However, their corporate DNA goes against that, from the early 80s on. They really want to provide a unified and 'beautiful' experience for their customers. Tinkerers open up the hood and cause variety and divergence from the norm. (Think all the weird kludges in Windows because it has to support such a variety of hardware).
"We're a little too into sports in this country, I think we gotta throttle back. Know what I mean? People come home from these games, 'We won! We won!' No, they won - you watched."
"They won, you watched." It really resonated with me. I was spending quite a bit of cash to watch a bunch of fit guys try to kick a ball better than another bunch of fit guys in different coloured jumpers. If 'my guys' won I felt good and if they didn't, I didn't. It seemed ridiculous to me. If they won, why should I feel happy? I don't even know them! And if they lost, why should I feel upset? It wasn't my fault.
I haven't really been to an AFL game since then and barely watch it on TV. If Collingwood makes a final, like they did last year, then yes, I want them to win and I will watch the game on TV. But it doesn't go any further than that.
Giving up on the spectating didn't make me go out and play football myself, but I do mostly spend my spare time being creative rather than just spectating.
Anytime I think of the masses of creative output of greats like Beethoven, Picasso, Edison I think to myself - "The amazing power of not watching TV for four hours a day."
The underlying point about spectatoritis is interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with what it means to "become a man" or developing a "manly 'philosophy of leisure'". Surely plenty of people of both genders are suffering from spectatoritis, and not only in spectator sports (and even there, there are plenty of female fans as well).
Nash's book is not explicitly gendered in that way, though it was written in 1938 and so does have a more implicit built-in assumption that it's probably addressing men (and it does use "man" and "men", but in the now-old-fashioned sense that's sort of gendered but ambiguously so and might also mean "people in general", depending on context). But it's not really accusing its readers of being insufficiently masculine; it's accusing them of being too passive, which seems more to the point.
It's a gender-specific blog. A good one, too.
The blog overall, from a brief skim, seems about 50% sexist nonsense, and 50% obsessed-with-old-accoutrements-of-masculinity hipsters (I expect to find some fancy moustaches and pipes). If it matters, I'm a man, and I find this kind of stuff trying to tell me what it means to be a "real man" pretty offensive, backwards crap.
Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the "old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular modern idea is just one more).
But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of "man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.
I would love to see any evidence that the usage of 'he' somehow harms females, and I would support any evidence-supported solution that is suggested (for one thing, I wouldn't want it to harm my wife and daughters), but so far this whole issue seems to be completely locked in the realm of hypothesis, and it's without the feeblest suggestion of evidence.
The pronoun thing is probably a minor issue in the gender wars, though. That "he" is the default pronoun isn't a problem so much as, say, that the vast majority of scientists are men, which sends the message to young girls that science is not for them.
There's some interesting studies and anecdotes in this page: http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/pap/node6.html
Usually when this is called a problem it is done along with making the implicit or explicit suggestion that men in scientific fields are sexist and somehow discriminate against women. But I, like most men in science, would severely reprimand anyone who treats women unfairly. Therefore I find it extremely unwarranted and unfair that feminists think it is OK to accuse us of sexism without evidence. And I find it saddening that not more men have the courage to speak up against these accusations.
I'm sure there have been cases of discrimination against women in science, but this in no way proves that it's widespread, or that it's affecting the number of women in science.
[* The logic goes that since men and women are identical, there should be just as many women in science as there are men. But this conclusion is unwarranted because the premise is unsupported by evidence.]
If you change the gender of a name and leave everything else constant on an academic CV, acceptance rates go down from 70% to 45%. http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=1...
If it were actually the case women were inherently less interested in science, sure, I wouldn't care, but discrimination exists. Much more subtly than it used to, but it's still there, and hence still a problem.
edit: http://artofmanliness.com/faq/
"1. What makes you experts on manliness?
We’ve never said we’re experts. In fact, the idea that there’s such a thing as an “expert in manliness” is sort of silly. We’re just two people who are passionate about helping men become better men. We want to provide an alternative men’s magazine for men who are tired of the crap that’s put out for men by most media outlets. We see our role as researchers and writers who try to dig up the best information out there and make that info available to readers. I’m learning right along with everyone else."
I'll watch, thanks.
The whole "flame of glory" model sounds really awesome when you're a healthy person, but you'll find that it tends to break down pretty catastrophically about two seconds after the flame goes out.
It's one thing to be a spectator by choice, but when you're forced into the role, it's a completely different story.
P.S. That said, thank you for reminding us of the question, "who wants to live forever" - it is perhaps the single most epic line from the 1980 film Flash Gordon.
Those who want to poke maximum fun at couch potatoes always seem to pick American football for their examples. That's because civilians don't actually play American football, so there's relatively little danger of an embarrassing counterexample popping up. (Actually, plenty of teenagers play American football, but perhaps teenagers know better than to try to argue with curmudgeonly trolls on the Internet.) It's rarer to hear people try to make fun of Americans for not playing basketball or, god help us, golf... because in any city in America a golf course or a pickup basketball game is probably no more than ten minutes away. I know a bunch of middle-aged adults who play basketball. I know this because they occasionally turn up with basketball injuries. ;)
Incidentally, I only just noticed an incredible folly at the heart of this article: If you sample teenagers, you'll find a much larger percentage of them playing sports. But a smaller and smaller percentage of the American population is under 25. Is it really such a terrible thing that so few 55-year-olds play contact sports? Aren't our emergency rooms busy enough as it is?
When you think about it even more casually, going down to the park with a few friends, rugby and american football are both hard to replicate. Sure you could pretend to both be quarterbacks and pass the ball back and forward but it's really nothing like the actual sport. Same with rugby which is mostly backwards passes.
Taking the American sports angle you can see why it's much more common to seeing friends playing basketball casually as getting a few friends together you can mostly replicate the game.
I used to play it often. But I find I can get as much enjoyment watching pros, who completely dominates the game, play against each other.
The difference is watching doesn't involved the mental effort that playing does. After 8hrs of design/programming, the last thing I want to do is think more.
I imagine the required effort is the same for grabbing a beer and watching football on TV vs going outside and playing it.
A) you've seen a football player. I wouldnt want to be hit by one of those guys.
B) you've understood the beauty of american football. Imagine a sport which combines the ferocity of grappling along with the strategy of chess. Its just an awesome sport to watch and comprehend.
If everyone on Earth had (and acted upon) Earth-shaking visions like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Ford, then the world would be full of amazing ideas that never get carried out to their potential. We need the drones, workers and the queen. Too many queens and the hive dies.