I was surfing the Internet yesterday when I stumbled across this piece at the Daily Dot. It was an interesting quick hit and contained information previously unknown to me. And yet I found myself incredibly annoyed by it. Bear with me for a moment while I try to discern why.
The story is about David Cronenberg and his special effects team creating the famous exploding-head effect in Scanners. The film is out on Criterion Blu-ray now and this is one of the special features. It's a neat, short little video. You can watch it here:
Except, though, the Daily Dot piece isn't really "about" the video or the effect. Here's the banner and headline used to introduce the post to readers:
What this post is "about," then, is explaining to people where this gif comes from:
I'm not sure why this annoys me. I have no doubt that far more people, especially younger people, have seen that gif than have seen the move whence the gif came. So the Daily Dot is doing a service, of a sort. And that gif is by no means alone; how many people who have used the below image have ever even heard of Wonder Showzen?
Not many, I'd wager.
And yet. The chop-shopping of culture—the stripping out funny reactions from film and TV and using out-of-context quotes to make a joke or a point—is somewhat overwhelming. Perhaps we should blame The Simpsons for this?
We are daily inundated with a flood of images that we only half-connect to their original source, if at all. Lord knows I'm as guilty of this as anyone. Is this the end result of "remix culture"? Are we left with nothing but a mishmash of context-free images half-remembered? A sort of Newspeak that relies on images and pictograms rather than "double unpluses"?
Or, you know, maybe I'm just overreacting because I'm annoyed by Millennial ignorance. It's hard to say.