James Rolfe's reaction to Ghostbusters trailer creates drama

[Drew Sebastino]

It's bad to berate someone for being too sensitive, but isn't it also bad to villainize someone just for making a crude joke? (Look at the other thread.) To me, it just seems like an excuse to make someone look bad.

Guessing this is sarcasm. Please let it be.

I guarantee it is.

[Great Hierophant]

Guessing this is sarcasm. Please let it be.

You forgot to include the opening when you quoted that.

I guarantee it is.

Ditto.

[darryl.revok]

I have a theory about it though which may help explain why it is happening. I'm really becoming of the opinion that social media is inherently toxic.

I was thinking about what you've said, which is something I've thought before and I feel is probably a pretty common sentiment among people in our age group. I just realized that there is probably a very simple explanation for this.

When we communicate with someone in person, we get all kinds of little cues from their facial expressions, the intonation in their voice, their body language, and all of these things communicate emotion. We are wired to feel the emotions of others through empathy. (I realize that those in the autism spectrum may be affected by this considerably less. It's an interesting topic, I think, but one I'm going to leave out of this post. Please feel free to comment on that issue if you'd like though.) As such, we feel the emotions of the people with whom we're communicating. It's discouraging to say something hurtful when you feel the sadness it causes.

It's a lot easier to dismiss others' emotions when we don't see them. It's a lot easier to say things online or through texts that we'd never say to someone's face. I also tend to think, that regardless of our natural pathological inclination, the pathways for empathy are reinforced through use. I feel a person who relies on social media as their primary social outlet might not only have a higher tendency to be less empathetic online, but could also have less capacity for empathy overall.

I feel like even through empathy, we learn consideration for others through logic. Even if empathy causes you to instantly receive a negative stimulus from saying something wrong, it's analyzing what you said and why it was hurtful that gives you data you can use to adapt your behavior patterns. It is possible to empathize online with someone through their words, but that's only a very small part of communication. So first imagine how many types of communication are lost, and then think about the fact that you'll only have a chance to empathize in an instance where the response is strong enough for the person to say something about it, so, I'd say probably around 95% of learning opportunities will be lost.

Social media is a tool though, and of course not inherently good or evil. Not understanding, respecting, and balancing use of anything can be dangerous, however.

[Drew Sebastino]

which is something I've thought before and I feel is probably a pretty common sentiment among people in our age group.

Is 17 in that age group?

[darryl.revok]

which is something I've thought before and I feel is probably a pretty common sentiment among people in our age group.

Is 17 in that age group?

I didn't really think so when I was writing it, but surely those who support/oppose the proliferation of social media come in all age groups. Probably less common amongst those who have never known a world without it, yet I still see senior citizens enveloped in their smart phones pretty commonly.

The trend of unreciprocated communication isn't new. When I was young, it was MTV and video games. At the time though, it didn't seem the norm to me for a family to watch television while eating, and it wasn't very common for there to be a television in a restaurant. In my earlier memories, there weren't televisions in our individual rooms. We watched TV or movies or played games as a family. As these trends progress, more and more of our primary emotional influences are becoming things that are almost entirely separated from our actual lives and experiences.

So what do we do? Throw out all of our TVs and computers and games? No no. We can't deny some of these things have given us great access to knowledge that wasn't there before. I just think it's about balance. I would think that if these people who are attacking James Rolfe were a bit more invested in their own personal lives, they'd be more apprehensive in exercising their public voice to attack someone over comments not even directed at them or at something in which they were involved.

I didn't see Patton Oswalt's video because I don't really care and I didn't particularly find this James Rolfe video to be his best, but I think it had a valid point that needed to be made to some people, and that's that you vote with your dollar, and if you don't like it, don't support it. All in all I support the idea of him being more active in film criticism because I think it shows that that's his real passion and the topic on which he's most knowledgeable. He seems more like a casual gamer whose goof videos got really popular because they were entertaining. And I'm glad they did because they are entertaining.

But the real reason I'm posting this, is to let people know if you didn't, that the new Godzilla movie which will most likely not get a US release, will be co-directed by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame. That show was a pretty big part of my teenage years, and I'd say one of the best kaiju stories ever told, so I'm excited about Shin Gojira. I wish Rolfe's video on that topic got as much attention as the Ghostbusters thing.

[Myask]

I think most of the "drama" comes from people who are responding to some fragmentary, polarized idea of what his video said, gleaned entirely from reactionary tweets. The nature of twitter is that you rarely see original ideas; you see an opinion on the idea first, and often that's all you see.

Rolfe's video hardly looks like the picture being painted of it. Not even Patton Oswalt's response was twisting its meaning, he was criticizing it for what it was (i.e. drivel). It quickly becomes a game of hater-telephone from there, though.

Hater telephone, you say. *sneezes on you*