It’s so easy to criticize the media, Hollywood, movies, the theatre. We love to judge the things others do. It’s so easy to look over there, and tell them how wrong they are. Funny how we don’t realize the media is just an imitation of us.
All media, even books, reflect back on us who we are, what we do, how our lives are structured. Even in the most imaginary scenarios, authors and screen writers must give you something to cling to, something you can connect with, something that speaks to you. Media speaks all our stories as a collective, and just as we develop and learn how to adapt to new technologies, so does it. Just as we make mistakes that stare us right in the face, so does it. But of course, no one likes to look into the mirror.
You may have doubts, you might not believe what I say. That all media is made up, and isn’t real, after all people lie on the internet all the time. Just as they lie in real life. But the media’s apparent distance from us makes that lie more effective.
I sit in meetings where we discuss anthropomorphic drawings of an animal, and discuss their motivations to do things. I work in an industry that makes drawings come to life, that creates and entirely new world with its own logic and physics and can manage to make those objects, that world, those drawings, make you FEEL something. And as we discuss how to extract that feeling, we debate motivation, instinct, reason. We debate that these drawings are just as us humans, that they have a purpose, a personality, a mind of their own. And in order to do that we must make them like us. A reflection of us.
None of those systems are perfect, certainly they all have their flaws and we should continue to critique them so that they may improve. But every once in a while, turn that critique inwards to yourself, and try to figure out what part of you helped create that same system, and what part of you could improve in order to change it.
Upside Down Flight 