Conversations With Ben #30: Bobby Ewing In The Shower

Louise sent me the above image, which she'd found on the book of faces, in response to the news that David Cameron is rising from the dead, like a Marvel super-villain, ready to resume the reign of terror and destruction that led to his previous downfall. I mean, he's going to have to go some to beat completely destroying the country, but bad guys always like to think big, don't they?

Anyway, I was rather amused by the aged cultural reference, so I shared the image with my work colleagues on our Whatsapp group. Being teachers, they're a bunch of politically-minded so-and-sos who regularly carp on about the malevolent excesses of the Tory regime, so I figured they'd find it funny.

Only one person got the joke though. Everyone else just thought I was sharing a picture of a naked David Cameron. If they didn't think I was weird already...

Neil Young - Old Man

In despair, I decided to consult another young person about my faux pas. So I messaged Ben.

I should also point out that a few days earlier, I'd sent Ben a disgusted message regarding the Hollywood remake of 80's TV favourite The Fall Guy, starring Ryan 'as much charisma as a plank of 2x4' Gosling in the Lee Majors role and Aaron 'Oh my god, why does this guy keep getting work?' Taylor-Johnson as Howie Munson. To say I was horrified at this desecration of my childhood is a gross understatement.

Ben replied that he'd never heard of The Fall Guy. Worse still, he was less than complimentary when I sent him a video of the opening credits featuring the classic Lee Majors-sung theme tune. Frankly, he's lucky I was still talking to him.

Popular culture no longer applies to me.

Art Brut - Bad Weekend

Rol: As a 30-something who's never seen The Fall Guy, do you understand the cultural reference in this? 

Ben: David Cameron at uni with his pig-lover in the shower?

So you're not aware of Bobby Ewing in the shower and what that represents?

Dallas or Dynasty? Is that the who shot JR bit?

I'm aware of these things existing in a loose form.

Or is it the this is all a dream bit?

Dallas. They killed Bobby off. He was dead for a whole series. Ratings dived, so they brought him back to life. The explanation was, yes, the previous season had all been a dream. His resurrection happened with his wife waking up and finding him in the shower.

I kinda got there with some help.

Did the ratings return?

For a while, yes. But a lot of people were pissed off that they'd watched a whole season that was just a dream.

I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV
There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see

Abba - The Day Before You Came

Thanks though. You answered my question about how well this would be understood by a young person.

Hate to break it to you, but as I'm in my mid 30s, I'm not sure I class as a "young person".

You'll always be a young person to me.

Someone asked me, "Why is youth
Wasted on the rude and uncouth?
Blinded on cheap vermouth
A would be poet in Duluth
Long on time, short in the tooth
Fantasies of John Wilkes Booth
Come back when you're younger

Steve Wynn - Younger

See you had that, but I grew up in the early days of the internet where shock tactics were the shared things that are now cultural flagstones. Ask anyone my age what "goatse", "lemon party" or "meat spinner" are and you'll get nostalgia for an internet before it became corporatised. None of those are pleasant things but it represents the wider culture of the internet as a mysterious entity prior to it becoming standardised. The rise of these standardised sites can be attributed to places like blogger, Tumblr and myspace who sought tohomogenise how the internet looked and was consumed before the rise of the true current social media spaces. You just got shit telly.

That last line is a complete reduction, but I felt it hit as a good punchline.

Blow up your TV
Throw away your paper
Go to the country
Build you a home
Plant a little garden
Eat a lot of peaches
Try an' find Jesus on your own

John Prine - Spanish Pipedream

Don't google those things by the way.

I won't. But I feel like I've just seen a Lynchian glimpse behind a curtain I don't want to look behind.

Was it like the dark web?

I think dark web is exaggerating quite a bit, yet excessive gore, violence and stuff of a sexual nature was pretty much everywhere. But it wasn't for consuming content the way we use the internet now, it was just for shock. If that makes sense?

So people weren't hunting it down for kicks, it was just randomly placed to cause upset?

Elvis Presley - How the Web Was Woven

I spent a lot of time online in the early days of the Web. Why didn't I stumble across this shit?

The websites were passed along like folklore. The internet wasn't monetised at that point so there was no impetus to drive traffic.

Was this widely shared by your whole generation though? I wonder if it's comparable to the collective consciousness from my generation regarding the TV shows of our youth, even the ones we didn't watch.

Because there was far less choice, there was much more shared cultural knowledge back then.

These things were the early version of memes. Links sent to others in msn messenger, written on each other's schoolbooks, typed into a friend's computer in the computer room at school (before siteblocking).

Along with the Salad Fingers and Burnt Face Man stuff. They were all shared the same way those early emails used to contain funny pictures. Or the earliest meme: "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog".

Like sharing pages from the porn mags we found in the woods?

Exactly.

Bis - Dial-Up Internet Is the Purest Internet

Because you have to remember, my generation is the one that grew up in the world you mentioned whilst also growing up in the early days of widespread internet, meaning the habits from the former informed the way we used the internet.

Sam's generation however will experience a curated internet.

Not quite the same then. I'm consistently surprised by the lack of a shared cultural knowledge by today's teenagers. Like how many of them don't know who Homer Simpson or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader are. I know they're all older generation examples, but I knew about John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart when I was a kid. Everything is fractured now, little pockets of knowledge but very few shared cultural touchstones.

Look, the internet now is curated along two distinct lines... 

1) a company wishing to monopolise visits to the internet (i.e the platform). 

2) content curated by the ways in which Sam will view the internet ( i.e. logarithms).

I feel like you're just sending me pages from your thesis now.

Soft Cell - Monoculture

My last point ties directly into yours though: the internet now is so curated towards likes and viewing habits (down to how long on average we stay on a single image or video, so as to then recommend more of the same to keep us engaged) that a level of shared culture isn't possible anymore.

Is this why nobody reads my blog?

The internet doesn't show you content about what you *think* you want to see anymore. It gives you stuff that you *do* engage with (positively or negatively). It needs you to stay engaged. And the data which it uses to provide you with this is based on hundreds of thousands of hours of billions of people's viewing habits. 

Shake - Culture Shock

So whilst it sounds utopian, it's not driven by enjoying, just engaging. You take a second to read how terrible that Daily Mail headline is on your Google news feed? You engaged with it. It'll show you more. But it needs time to work out why you engaged with it. So it shows you soft politically biased things in that area to see if you engage with those. If you do, you might get some alt-right stuff. It knows you're male based on how you view and men engage with alt right stuff more than women. Not engaging with that stuff enough, it'll move to testing your engagement with things until it finds where you are. 

This is how so many young men end up engaged with alt right stuff. Once they begin, it'll start flooding their feeds with it. Cars - sports cars - luxury cars - alpha mindset - Andrew Tate. Comic books - whining about certain aspects -  woke comics nowadays - anti woke - Andrew Tate. And it's not set up to force people into certain beliefs, but because of how we engage with the internet and the "need" to monetise it, it's the conclusion. 

Populist beliefs have become far stronger across the western world since the late 90s and increase year on year. That means it gets engagement so is viewed more. And on the internet, views = money, so notoriety and fame are the same thing. As a result, people who want to be successful express extreme opinions. Those get views. People want to make money, so they replicate those views.

They Might Be Giants - Youth Culture Killed My Dog

By no means am I saying Sam is destined to end up with those views. You're too decent a person and I know he'll learn from you. But he will be exposed to it. A lot of it. Without ever searching for it. His friends will. And some will identify with it. And people are trying to blame particular websites or certain heads of the hydra instead of dealing with having to have difficult conversations with their kids.

Is this why nobody reads my blog?

It's more that it's not monetisable, so the people who do read it or come across it will always be a small group, but they will have a level of interest in the subject matter that equals yours.

I was hoping for a better punchline than that.