The two posts "All your votes belong to us" and "Acting chameleon" reminds me of what has been on my mind.
This is not a "Passion" post, but I was so glad to see the Passion of The Christ because it is the first movie, I think, that does a service to Christ.
This is important because the language of the day, imho, revolves around entertaiment. Read the "acting chameleon" post and see how quickly you relate to the opinions, versus say MrSquiky's post on Humanism (which I found very well done and interesting.
Yeah, I could relate to MrSquiky (as I am a trained in cognitive pyschology), but reading about everquest and J. Depp is more captivating to the lay person (guilty, but self included) because we can more readily give an opinion we can back up.
When 9-11 happened, it was compared to a movie on more then one report I saw. Even the last sentence uses "9-11" because we understand it so completely (with all the connotations)-- thanks to the media.
That being said, I am curious to what degree other people think we need to be educated in entertainment (or is that education automatic anymore?) in order to both convey and understand important issues.
It is an open ended question becasue I am looking forward to a variety of thoughts.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
It's a matter of common language. As most people understand the language of pop culture, we can communicate using those touchstones almost as if they had intrinsic meaning; "Pauly Shore" has connotations to people of a certain age.
The more rarefied and technical the language gets, the less accessible it is -- especially if the immediate application of the things being discussed is not obvious. This is actually, IMO, deliberately reinforced by many experts in technical fields, who don't WANT their terminology to be understood; it's also an inevitable byproduct of the creation of "exact terms" used to speed conversation among those experts, albeit at the cost of losing the layman.
Most people are fluent in pop; they're not as fluent in, say, mechanical engineering. So you're more likely to get discussions of the first -- and more likely to get the core concepts of the second across to people if you frame them in common language.
Posted by Book (Member # 5500) on :
I agree with him...
Jargon
1. Nonsensical, incoherent, or meaningless talk. 2. A hybrid language or dialect; a pidgin. 3. The specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, or similar group. See Synonyms at dialect. 4. Speech or writing having unusual or pretentious vocabulary, convoluted phrasing, and vague meaning.