You go, meta writers, with your thinky thoughts and your “let’s overthink this”, with your attention to set dressing and editing as well as script and actor nuance, with your discussions about representation and what sorts of worldviews media producers are replicating or, sometimes, challenging.
“Meta” is a wonderful phenomenon – it’s basically grassroots, live, literary/ textual criticism, written for free by and for fan audiences, and shared by them in active learning communities.
Most literary and textual criticism (because let’s face it professional re-cappers and reviewers are mostly damn bad at informed critique) is gated – it’s locked up in academic journals and conferences, and you can’t get at it unless you have current membership of a university library. That’s beginning to change, as some journals shift to “open source”, but at present, the gates to the academy are still standing tall.
I loved literary criticism as an undergraduate but I felt somewhat disillusioned about its place in the world, precisely because it mostly took place walled up in the ivory tower. Did it have “real” social and cultural meaning, I wondered.
Here on Tumblr there are concentric circles of people, across national borders, and across age ranges, sharing the active, excited, analysis of media texts with one another. Here be joy and knowledge-sharing - fantastic! Because textual analysis shared, has the ability to make films and television shows and anime and gaming richer. That’s why people reblog “meta”, right? Because they want to join the conversation, because now they’ve seen something they hadn’t seen before, because it’s made the film or the episode resonate in a new way for them, or maybe because they passionately disagree with that analysis and want to offer their own. How wonderful.
So, you go, meta writers!
There is no such thing as “overthinking” a media text. Why would you want to use your intelligence and your imagination less, when you can use it more? If you engage with meta, whether as a writer or a reader, I guarantee that your imaginative and cultural life, your inner and intellectual worlds, will be richer, and deeper. You will learn things and you will ignite in yourselves the desire to learn. And as such, you will be active citizens of the world, moreover you will be part of a community of active citizens of the world - better able to change the world, together, rather than just to sit passively in it.
Therefore, praise be to meta.
↧
Praise be to Meta...
↧