LogFAQs > #894925956

I think this is due to the age of instant gratification and social media we're in now. We all want to be noticed and because there are so many other voices to compete against, being noticed is harder than ever. Therefore, if we make our views as broad and populist as possible, we'll be noticed. Having an unpopular or controversial opinion in this kind of landscape is often akin to making yourself a social pariah, so you have to be very careful about where you say something challenging, and to whom. It's most potent on Twitter. Thanks to the 140 character limit, there's no space to be insightful or start a substantial discussion, so sweeping statements and crowd-pleasing win the day.

I also heard somewhere that feeling intense emotions, such as anger, gives you a dopamine boost (I'm afraid I don't remeber where, or I would find it here.) Because of this, it's not inconceivable that some people might have gotten addicted to anger, and look for things to be outraged by so that they can get their next hit.

Speaking about academia, I remember when I was in University about 6 or 7 years ago now, I was doing film studies for one of my modules. One of the assignments was to make a group presentation on vampires in film, and the group was in discussed the portrayal of vampires in film, and how that has in turn resulted in particularly influential movie vampires influencing vampire mythology to some degree. The presentations were graded by two lectures. One of them loved it and said my group had the best presentation in the class because he thought we took an interesting approach and went outside the box (We had worked in that Spongebob clip of Nosferatu playing with the lights as an example of how widespread and recognisable that Nosferatu had become he could show up in as unexpected a context as that). By contrast, the other lecturer hated it and thought my group had the worst presentation because we didn't go with a more traditional approach, and on our feedback she asked why we hadn't considered vampires as an allegory for race, gender or sexuality, which is what several of the other groups had done. Blade (which we had not mentioned in the presentation) was cited specifically for black vampires. I'll admit I hadn't thought of Blade being black as a significant detail, so I'm not sure sure if this is a case of me not thinking deeply enough, or the trend OP mentioned of their English Lit thinking that the the author being black is the only important thing about them.

If I were to critically analyse Blade, I wouldn't have considered race and would have suggested that the vampires are portrayed in different ways in the first two films. In the first one, they're presented in a hedonistic sexualised sense in the club, with how they drink blood for pleasure more than nourishment, while in the second I'd suggest it's comparable to addiction as the new vampires are designed as more malnourished than the older ones, and they're more scrappy in their mannerisms. In case you're wondering about the assignment, my group got a low pass grade because the top marks from the first lecturer and the terrible marks from the second lecturer cancelled each other out.