Somebody Save Me

I've been talking to my friend Gabe today while obsessing over "Smallville." Gabe's something of an expert on WWII-era superhero comics, so I asked him about the propensity of such comics to make social commentary. I knew from my dad that X-Men is a metaphor for racism, but I didn't know that much about Superman. According to Gabe, what makes Superman interesting, aside from the potential Moses/Jesus parallels, is his sense of global idealism rather than nationalistic idealism. Created at the end of the 1930s, while war was brewing in Europe, Superman intended to save the world. In fact, creators Siegel and Shuster show Superman ending World War II in an issue from 1940--before American involvement. You may even recognize a few themes pertinent to today.

Network TV currently has two superhero shows on the air, and both are blockbusters. "Smallville" chronicles Superman/Clark Kent's early life, and "Heroes" is a modern-day X-Men story where genetic mutations endow a few people from around the world with "superpowers." These powers often reflect something in the character of the hero him or herself--an invulnerable teenage cheerleader, a woman whose dueling personalities reflect the cycles of abuse perpetuated on her and her sister by their father, a helpless young woman who develops the ability to make anyone obey her, a young nurse in the shadow of his politician father and brother who can emulate the powers of any nearby hero, and a spacetime bending Japanese office-worker bored with his routine, to name a few. The supervillain of "Heroes" gains his superpowers only by killing other heroes and absorbing their strengths. At first, he seems stable. Once a researcher deems his mutation inferior, however, he embarks on a quest to destroy all the "Heroes." It is envy that leads him to destruction.

Lex Luthor of the Superman comics isn't all that different. Superman's origins are contested in various publications, but the general consensus is that a disaster (war, crazy planetary meltdown) on the planet Krypton forces scientist Jor-El and his wife Lara to send their only child, Kal-El, away. Scholars have speculated about the nature of Superman and his fathers' names in the series. Siegel and Shuster were both Jewish, and Jor-El and Kal-El are similar to Hebrew phrases meaning, respectively, "fear of God" and "voice of God." After he arrives on Earth, Kal-El is adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent of Smallville. The name "Clark" is Martha Kent's maiden name. While Clark is still a teenager, Lex Luthor moves to Smallville. After Lex saves Clark's life by moving a kryptonite meteor out of the danger zone, Clark helps him set up a scientific laboratory. In gratitude, Lex attempts to create an antidote to kryptonite when an accident sets his lab on fire. In the process of saving Lex, Superman (superboy?) destroys his research and renders him bald. Lex becomes convinced that Superman is jealous of his scientific prowess and attempts to first outdo his good deeds through science and then ultimately turns against both Superman and humanity when his experiments go awry.

"Smallville" takes a different approach, but the story is ultimately the same: Lex and Clark are friends until Lex's jealousy takes over and he becomes a vessel for evil. Clark's high school sweetheart Lana Lang is at the center of the rift between Clark and Lex.

The main difference between the superhero comics of yore and today's versions is that the latter are stripped of their social commentary. "Smallville" has episodes that touch on contemporary problems like, say, illegal immigration, but ultimately they say nothing (in the episode in question, a single child in reunited with his mother and labor abuses are stopped, but the rest of the worker-immigrants are returned without amnesty to their countries of origin with virtually no mention). "Smallville" shows Clark taking on individuals entirely in rural Kansas. Problems are localized to the Smallville/Metropolis area, and a larger global view is never presented.

"Heroes" goes global, including Japan and India, but so far the closest it's come to social commentary is that politicians shouldn't take dirty money and cheating on your wife gets you in trouble.

When Gabe and I started talking, our conversation was about apathy, not superheroes, but contemporary representations of heroics (in TV--there are still some new comics that deal with serious issues) show that same postmodern nihilism and disregard for context. Superheroes are still around, so clearly we still like the idea of "being saved" and "good vs. evil"...but who is saving us...and from what?

'Til next time.

Like Violent Video Games? Don't Move to Germany.

A recent article from MSNBC reports that legislation is in the works in Bavaria and Lower Saxony to lock up creators, distributors, and even players of violent video games in the wake of a recent school shooting.

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say I have serious reservations about media censorship. Germany both before and after reunification in 1989 has something of a history (though it is hardly unique) when it comes to censorship. While the official German constitution (taken from the West German constitution under post-WWII occupation) includes the right to free speech, it is subject to restrictions. Many of these restrictions, published in an index of "harmful materials" established by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM, are similar to American restrictions. Pornography may not be distributed to youth, and materials inciting violence or instructing people on how to commit crimes are heavily regulated. Materials provoking racial hatred are also regulated.

More notably, Germany regulates historical thought relating to its role and history in WWII strictly. The 2006 World Cup brought this regulation to the forefront of public view when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran announced his plan to attend games held in Germany (he did attend, with diplomatic immunity) and over 1000 people gathered in Nuremberg in protest.

Controversy has surrounded violent video games since their very inception; political leaders and special interest groups around the world have long sought their regulation and censorship. Germany is certainly no exception in this case, and current attempts to censor games in Germany mirror reactions in the United States after the Columbine High School shooting of 1999 where a group representing families of Columbine victims pressed charges against the creators of the video game Doom. The presiding Colorado judge dropped the case citing "social utility in expressive and imaginative forms of entertainment, even if they contain violence," but the gaming industry has long exercised a certain amount of self-censorship.

Recent studies have partially vindicated groups who claim violent video games exacerbate violent behavior. On November 28, 2006, researchers at Indiana University released a report finding that adolescents who played violent video games experienced increased emotional arousal and decreased self-control.

By the standards of the Colorado judge, the violent content and even effects of video games does not eradicate their social value. Nevertheless, many political states limit free speech when it incites violence. In my opinion, video games--even violent ones--do not intend to incite violence. Nevertheless, the Indiana U study and others like it demonstrate correlations between biological and psychological damage (not necessarily violence) and violent video games. Under Germany's "Youth Protection Law" (Jugendschutzgesetz) that seems reason enough to regulate or restrict their use, and Germany in fact already requires video games distributed within the country to be altered to limit their violent content (see the article listed in the first paragraph). But the legislation under review goes further than those restrictions to imprison players of violent video games.

The relation between violent video games and real-world violence is indirect, but it is not absent. Nevertheless, it seems absurd to imprison players on the off-chance that their game-play may cause them to commit an act of violence.

Thoughts are welcome.

Antiseptic technology

I'm reading Emergence by Steven Johnson right now, and it's set me thinking about how we sanitize the future. At the start of the book, Johnson talks about Jane Jacobs' theories of urban development and how neighborhoods form. But as the book progresses, he only briefly touches on demographics and associated issues of class and race. At first, I didn't think it was a problem. In fact, I barely noticed it. But as Johnson moves into what eventually starts to look like technophilia and the idealization of emergent software, some of his examples give me pause.

One of the central tenets at the heart of emergent behavior is the idea that acting locally produces global results. If enough people walking along the sidewalks of the Lower East Side interact, the sum of their interactions is a self-regulating system. What's missing from this analysis, aside from one chapter analyzing the history of how the "lower classes" have fit into theorists' understandings of emergence, is a set of social "mirror neurons"--as Johnson starts to discuss emerging emergent technologies (hee), Emergence loses a lot of its socioeconomic value and Johnson's argument gets sanitized. Johnson talks about every TV coming with TiVo (or something similar) and connecting to something like the internet to create TV "neighborhoods" based on individual and global user preferences. In the midst of this argument, he refutes the idea that TV and the internet contribute to user isolation based on the fact that the technology aids communal emergent behavior.

So what's the problem?

If you don't have money, you won't have a TiVo. The communities that could potentially form won't account for the impoverished, and entertainment will continue to alternately misrepresent, ignore, insult, and exclude the poor. While media may be tailored to certain "communities" through TiVo, the same groups who have traditionally been excluded by the top-down system of the networks will still be excluded by the bottom-up system because they won't have access to the technology required to form their own communities, and thus the impoverished (and possibly other groups, this is just the obvious one) lose what little grip they had on media solidarity.

I'm still enjoying Emergence, don't get me wrong. But I'm concerned about the blanket sanitization that today's zeitgeist chasers exhibit. Just talking about technology's potential to shape thought isn't enough. Neither new technology nor bottom-up self-organization is inherently ethical. It may be useful, but many of the social problems that were around before bottom-up technology will still exist during and after it. Focusing on the technology without moral discourse draws attention away from those problems.

Even my beloved Star Trek, which early on incorporated race, rarely explores issues of class and never concerns itself with sexual orientation. Looks to me like technology glosses over social problems rather than fixing them. Hmm.

EDIT: Here's something entertaining and mildly relevant! The blog software I use, greymatter, has quotes on just about every page you work with. In the "preview" page, this quote came up:

"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create."—Leonard Sweet