MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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THE MAIN EVENT | MY GLASS HOUSE | THE PREVIOUS EVENT | THE NEXT EVENT | |
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| The world is vicious and arbitrary. |
| Random, sensational danger is a coiled snake poised to (maybe/maybe not) spring at you with every step you take through your precarious life. Risk lurks and snickers at every turn. |
Movie theater enthusiasts! Danger!
Menstruators! Beware!
Heterosexual Men!
Cyberspace waders, trollers and wanderers be warned! Viruses, infections, allergies and plagues are anxious to infect your tools of cyber movement. You've got mail but for chrissakes don't open it!
And of course the Y2K millennium anticipation is ballooning with apocalyptic potential. Are You Prepared?
The litigation trend
The frenetic, frantic verve of mass culture media gnashes its teeth and hyperventilates in rhythm with the pace of day-to-day life. Speed! Faster Faster! Digest this slab of contrary information! Does the pace of technological advancement make our lives easier or more complicated? Are we freer or are we more enslaved to a tightening System? Are we spinning our independent wheels in an increasingly alienated fashion? Have lickety-split developments in mass communication brought us closer together in a utopian group hug or are we more afraid and suspicious of each other? Is white noise fatal?
Are we walking dead?
Everyday the stampede of mass culture media nags us about the arbitrariness of real life: an airplane crashes; Really Important People suddenly die; accidents, mishaps and acts of savagery feature a death count of Incidental People; a disturbed individual climbs up into a clocktower with a rifle. Meanwhile a pageant of glib authority figures promise to Save Us, Guide Us and Protect Us, particularly, today, from ourselves.
Maybe we are over-stressed, parched-mouthed Pavlovian dogs. Mass culture media extends the tension and definition of our fears, discomforts and insecurities; advertisers, political propaganda and marketeers define our needs. We are constantly negotiating a surround-sound squeeze play and perhaps fear has become the driving force of our lives. What is the fear? Does it have a form? And where did it come from? How much of it is manufactured? What limitations does the fear impose upon you?
by sharing urban legends. Urban legends are hoaxes that perpetuate intolerance and hysteria; they exhibit fear of change. Non-white people are often allotted "uncivilized" roles in urban legends:
Urban legends are shared amongst the denizens, the folk that exist beneath the tsunamiof mass culture media. Urban legends reflect, replicate and imitate the same reactionary fear of change that the mass culture media and authority figures perpetuate; they reflect, replicate and imitate the same reactionary fear of change that many individuals feel within their own interiors. Urban legends could be considered a valuable artform if there is any truth to the adage that art imitates life. We could even turn this adage on its feet in these decadently mediated times: life imitates art.
I had never witnessed any urban legends
Cyberspace
The internet has lengthened, widened and quickened the spread of the fear plague as we talk amongst ourselves in chat rooms and e.mail. We can fling and receive "information" farther and faster than on the physical plane. Incidents, events and rumors that were previously isolated in one physical locale can now spread like a boundless and durable adrenaline burst in a non-space realm that defies a familiar sense of cartography, clocks and calendars.
I asked Ryan Liebenberg,
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Unlike other media forms,
It is the internet that can ultimately elicit critical thought. The resources available to explore other sides of "information" on the internet are more far-reaching than any other medium of communication. If you receive a forwarded e.mail warning you of yet another harrowing hazard in life, you can always check out the warning's authenticity at urbanlegends.com. Anxious about a computer virus? Visit lucifer.com/virus.
Or if you want to debate
Urban legends
Most urban legends
Day-to-day life of ordinary folk
is more palpable than the vast terrain of Ruling Forces of Power. Keeping one's personal life together and secure is often a complicated-enough prospect. To consider the Behemoth of exterior webs of power can blow the mind and invoke futility and helplessness. As individuals, we can paranoically glance down at our seat in a movie theater to assure ourselves that a hypodermic needle loaded with a deadly disease is not going to arbitrarily infect us.
However, as an individual I am impotent
What we don't know often frightens us;
The mission of urban legends
Ryan Liebenberg
+++ The Previous CULTURECAST +++ The NEXT CULTURECAST +++
As you plop into your movie theater seat, a syringe loaded with a deadly disease could be poised for connection with the naive fall of your innocent gluteus maximus. Outrageous!
Don't fish for change in the coin return slots of pay telephones! Warning! Those syringes chock full o' deadly diseases are also arbitrarily placed in coin return slots of pay telephones. Surprise! You're dead!
Tampons contain Asbestos! Yes Yes! Fatal Asbestos! You are slowly but surely killing yourself every 28 days.
Perhaps you will encounter a good-looking and eager female stranger at a public entertainment facility. Maybe she will invite you to her place for cocktails. Do not accompany this good-looking and eager female stranger to her abode. That inviting female that lubricates your heart and your loins may slip a mickey into your drink and then Steal Your Kidneys once you have slipped into unconsciousness! Gasp! These black widow viscera thieves lure their prey in bars, discotheques and probably even video rental outlets and Starbucks.
has developed the belief that we are all helpless idiots that need to be warned that the contents of our hot cups of coffee are indeed hot, that shampoo is "for external use only." We are a feckless, victimized lot, ready to be gouged, bamboozled and blown-away. Use risk only as directed.
does an excellent job of poking and prodding the libidinal forces into either an immobilized state of idling anxiety or into fits of reactionary fear. View any local news broadcast on television and take note of the rhetoric; adjectives such as "terrorizing," "shocking," "draconian" and "traumatizing" sensationalize petty events while incidents that are truly horrifying are drained of all substance by the mediating puppeteers who speak for us and re-orchestrate real events into a blitzkrieg of slick stun bombs.
However, ironically (irony and cynicism are so fashionable today), these same authority figures are often the ones who keep us in a constant state of tension with their continual enthusiasm for wars both abroad and at home (war on drugs, war on gangs, war on illiteracy, war on tobacco, war on expletives, war war war etc. etc. etc.). Are we perpetually shell-shocked by authoritarian figures and mass culture media?
Fear.
Life itself often resonates like dice cracked on a cosmic casino floor. Comedian Dennis Leary quips "Life sucks. Wear a helmet." Franklin Delano Roosevelt said "There is nothing to fear but fear itself." The fear response releases adrenaline so that we may either fight or take flight, so that we may Act. However if we are suspended in a state of fear or anxiety for too long, we become immobilized and suggestible. A scientist named Pavlov demonstrated this stress-threshold theory on dogs. Governments have been implementing this theory on people ever since Pavlov's dogs drooled, yelped and submitted.
We perpetuate fear amongst ourselves
until I entered the realm of Cyberspace.
Now I regularly receive all sorts of forwarded warnings, alerts and cautions. If I am not warned of nefarious ingredients in day-to-day products then a self-righteous dweeb is damning me to hell if I don't forward their freaking e.mail to ten people for the sake of little Ashley or Zachary (who is dying of Leprosy, Scurvy or Depression--their life depends upon forwarded electronic mail).
is officially infected with the fear plague. Commercialization marches to a hysterical beat--it must in order to keep need-defining formulas intact. I have been on-line for only four years; over the previous two years I have been impressed with the increasing amount of anxious shrapnel that I must negotiate. The fear is both fascinating and repulsive; it is a delicious duality; it is an organic and artificial motif of luscious angst.
friend and folklorist extraordinaire, for his thoughts and feelings about the Urban Legend Breeding Effect of the internet. Are the urban legends themselves proliferating (new and improved snapshots of hazard) or is cyberspace merely an infinite, infectious catalyst for existing legends? "I don't believe that there are more legends now," Ryan says, adding that "the perception of proliferation may be due to new venues of distribution and the growing number of people using them. There are certainly a great many more people using e.mail now than there were 5 years ago."
Ryan Liebenberg maintains that cyberspace is ideal for urban legend proliferation because the written word tends to elicit authority yet often in cyberspace the written word is, at the same time, informal. The face of communication is changing; protocols and procedures are shedding their previously familiar forms; text, the venue of binding contracts and expert opinion, is now utilized for casual conversations, salacious banter and unpretentious revelations; exciting, yes? or no?
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the internet still features great accessibility to multiple states of mind. Disinformation and misinformation can spread like a black plague, but the jolt of an awakening can also spread like a lightning bolt across a dark sky before dawn. Unlike television, periodicals and radio, information cannot be so easily withheld on the internet; on the internet we can find information that mainstream media withholds. One does not need permission to be heard in cyberspace; one does not need to cross their fingers that their point of view will be printed in the op-ed section of a mainstream newspaper. In the discourse of the mind, All is (pretty much) permitted. This is why governments want to Regulate cyberspace--they want your mind.
the authenticity of urbanlegends.com or lucifer.com/virus you can gather evidence and create your own information center. Or you can not gather evidence and create your own opinion center. This is the beauty of the internet: it screams, whispers, winks and seduces other angles of perception. I am both delighted and ired by my collisions in cyberspace. I am elevated, degraded, humiliated and persuaded. I am not afraid; I am enchanted, disillusioned, disturbed and curious.
attempt to give rational form to an irrational world. We are inundated with contrary memes, messages and sound-bites on a daily basis. We want an explanation for arbitrary tragedy; we want someone to blame for the tragedy that accompanies the comedy of change. We want to bind, gag and regulate chaos because we cannot control what we don't yet know; yet chaos is long-winded and its breath easily escapes through the barbed wire of the most controlling schemes.
are set in the most banal landscapes; initially mundane plots go helter-skelter: we are going to the movie theater; we are expressing our sexuality; we are driving on an average road in an average town. Ordinariness is usurped by senseless tragedy. Urban legends are the lore of ordinary folk.
against the fleet of black helicopters that might send thought-control microwaves into my skull; I lack the strength and power to intercept the antics of my nation's government/corporations. Yet a communication venue such as the internet is most likely to assure me that I Am Not Alone and Alienated because it exhibits the most versatile representation of The People.
the Unknown has power if we fear it; it is "a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma." Winston Churchill said that, so did David Ferrie, potrayed by the irrepressible Joe Pesci, in Oliver Stone's "JFK." Conspiracy theories attract stashed-sooth-slayers; conspiracy theorists are on a mission to expose dubiously manufactured fate; conspiracy theories are antagonistic.
is to sculpt collective rationalization of a fear of change; urban legends are reactionary. Change can be deemed as Fate whether we are creating Fate or whether we are reacting to Fate. Is it your fate to create your own fate? Or is it your fate to straddle and ride the manufactured fate of others? Sometimes we make an impact, other times we are impacted. The search for an answer, a truth treads more options in cyberspace than any other information venue.
asserts that "Legends are a communication form and forum, and with the easy ability to forward an e.mail they seem to be spreading like a virus." We live and imitate in a profound period of transition. As cyberspace, technology and communication continue expanding and constricting the ways that we are accustomed to living and thinking, we are sublimely positioned for potent doses of infection, immunization and imitation of fear, of life itself.
© 1999, GENERATOR 21.
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