Battlestar, Caprica, SF and Gender

First, to all of those college students who are in a mad quest to write a paper about "The Cask of Amontillado," the ending Italian phrase means "Rest in Peace." Do note that it is not something the protagonist with a vendetta would normally say. It is, however, something a priest is likely to say. Hmm, there's a poser.

And on to the topic the post is really about. I've had a chance to catch-up with the latest episodes of the SyFy Channel's new series Caprica. For those who don't know, the show takes place prior to the events of Battlestar Galactica (BSG), and does include some sequel information (after some pushing from those involved with the money).

If you're a fan of BSG, then you've already been through the "Starbuck is a girl" issues. No offense to the original Starbuck, but I thought the change was quite clever. Also, if you're a fan of BSG, you already know that many of the strongest and powerful characters in the series were female. Villains and Goodgals alike.

This might not seem unusual to new fans of the SF genre, but for those who date back to the stone tablet days, having strong female characters is a bit unusual. In the old days, they were mostly restricted to falling in love with Captain Kirk, screaming, falling, and wearing short skirts. Often, all of these occurred in a single Star Trek episode. It seemed females just couldn't be a part of SF.

Then Ripley appeared, and things changed (Aliens). Okay, even today the short skirts remain. But most everything else has changed.

I won't go into gender and SF. Many words have been written on the topic, and if you've not read them (this includes those students looking for something to cut and paste in your essay due at the end of this week), take the time to read the books and articles about the new role of females in SF.

Instead of venturing there, and listing articles and books, I'll jump to Caprica. At first glance, like BSG, the show seems hard and manly, full of murder and swearing ("frak"). But after an episode or two, the male anger fades into the background, replaced by teenage, female angst. The real focus of the show is on teenage girls, one of which who is a robot, and another who has no body, and a third who seems to be torn about how to interact with her robot/cyberghost friend. A quick glance at the promo photos and cast photos in this post highlights the real demographic of the series: young females. Yes, it is still aimed at males as the "Apple" photo reveals, but it is also focused at the female viewership.

For an SF series, this is unusual - at least it is historically, the last five years have seen many changes. For fans of SF, this is great news as it means there are new fans of the genre, and what appears to be a growing number of fans. And really, it is a direction the genre should be heading.

All of the above is nothing new nor surprising. As I said, it has been happening consistently over the last few years. What is interesting is how many males have not noticed. Why? I suspect because the genre is reflecting society, and is at last catching up from the Dark Ages of the genre. With any luck, as in the past, real life will imitate art and the gender barrier will continue to decline culturally based upon the acceptances of new females roles in the genre.

Deep Focus and the New Dark Age (Part I)

Over the past few days, I've had quite a bit of time to focus on living without electricity. It is a wondrous thing we've mastered: energy. And in so many ways we've built our lives around it. So when storms cause power outages, daily life is changed. Lucky for me I have plenty of books, and the entire world was not without electricity (meaning Starbucks is the bright light in the darkness - as they never run out of power).

The events of the storm, and a recent WAMU radio show I heard on my car radio started me thinking about the direction of culture. That's not completely true. I started thinking about it a week earlier (known as "the golden age of electricity"), when I noticed that a television show was "frozen" to allow someone to be overlaid and make a commercial pitch. Yes, the show was in progress; the screen froze, and then a fellow appears with the show in the background, and the commercial begins. Why? Because those folks with DVRs are skipping commercials. The DVR is also responsible for the bottom of the screen always beubg filled with ads and commercial, and now the shows are stopping in the middle to prevent DVR drivers from skipping past the commercials (I love my DVR.

In any case, that's when I started thinking about this topic. Then synchronicity brings about a power failure and a show on a related topic. It's a must I post about it.

So what am I going on about? Two topics really, which is why I have a PART I on this post. One topic is culture and commodities, and the other topic is deep focus - our attention span (I wonder how many people have stopped reading by this point? :> )

Recently, on the Diane Rehm show, the subject of "Distraction and Democracy" was the focus. The guests spoke quite a bit about the decreasing attention span of our culture, while making a few predictions about the future. One guest, Maggie Jackson, has even written a book on the subject: Distraction: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. I've yet to read it, but from what I've garnered, she compares historical moments, focusing on "ages of darkness," and concludes that our present culture is on a historical precipice for a new dark age (that's surface information in action). That is to say, it seems there are quite a few similarities to the present historical moment and previous historical moments prior to the onset of a dark age.

What I'm going to ramble about is something similar - but maybe I'll hold off on the dark age aspect as I've yet to read her book. Instead, I'll touch upon the fact that we do live in society with a reducing attention span. And our culture is growing around the need to reduce the attention span all the more. Television is always the first suspect when hunting for the cause of reduced attention spans. The Internet is a popular second. As television has been covered quite a bit, I'll stick to the Internet. Seldom are books and dictionaries (printed versions) blamed.

A technological marvel, and the world's thinest layer of information is the Internet. Almost any topic can be found on the Internet, but seldom is more than a "page" or two of information pulled up. The Internet is a great glosser (my word) of data. Want to learn about an event in history? Wikipedia will have a page that sums it up. If not there, then a blog (uh oh). But usually the blog post will be brief (ha-ha), sometimes a two part post, and then a few comments. There is no "deep focus," such as found in a book on the topic. And it's easy! This means we spend less time reading a web-page on Aristotle's book on ethics then we do reading Nicodemian Ethics. This is termed surface information - Cliff's Notes, or Spark's Notes, etc. In fact, in today's culture, who has time to read Nicodemian Ethics, except for those in the academic world? This is how our culture reinforces the need for surface information. What was once a convenience is now becoming a necessity. That is to say, in the Information Age, we have a need for less information.

Of course, there are many causes for our need of surface information. But regardless of the causes, our culture is pushing us into a condition of being vaguely informed rather than deeply informed. All of this begs a question. Are we losing our ability to retain a deep focus on a subject? Many say "yes," and fault television with its quick commercials, sound bites, and news channels with talking head and tickers at the bottom (which is how most television shows look today). Others cite video games and the Internet for the aforementioned reasons, and too overall much variety of entertainment. Perhaps these things are all sources of the problem, but they are no longer independent issues. Each one has mingled with our culture and with our drive-through lifestyles. It seems they can no longer be singled out. It is how we live, and we live a life of distraction. Such a culture pushes for the need of surface knowledge, and reduced time investment in gathering knowledge. It seems ironic that the Information Age can bring about the Uninformed Age.

Naturally, this puts books on the endangered species list because books do require deep focus. Then again, maybe not. Books can be written to be fluffy and fast, and if we don't look beneath the surface of the words (as our culture teaches us to do), then even books becomes collections of surface information.

Hopefully my electricity will be restored by the time this post hits the Internet, and I can find other distractions. :) I'll follow with Part II, and our commodity culture, which is a part of this topic.