Explaining cultural references in stories

[Chris James]

"How on Earth did we manage before the Internet?" I'll tell you Des, we either asked or ignored.

I used to write down those small things I didn't understand and carry them with me all week in school. Then on Saturday I went to the library and tried to find the answers if I thought it important enough. By doing that I learned that if something sits long enough it either becomes unimportant or the understanding will seep in of it's own accord.

Unfortunately I think the internet takes away those choices and becomes a crutch for our developing thought processes. I remember when schools began to allow calculators and all of a sudden kids didn't know how to multiply and divide without one.

The same problem with words, why use a dictionary when the internet will define something for you. Of course what does one do with 14 million hits on a subject? Perhaps the internet is too complicated and we all know that search engines don't always have the best answers up front, just the most popular ones. A good thing most of us were eduycated....

[Nigel Gordon]

Chris asks "why use a dictionary when the internet will define something for you", there is a simple answer, when looking for the answer to one thing in a dictionary you are likely to come across other words that will come in useful later. The same is true about old fashioned encylopedia, I can't count the number of times I have gone to look up something and found myself reading about something totally different. I was fortunate enough as a teenager (I think I was about 15 at the time) to meet Bertrand Russel. He told me I should open an encyclopedia at random every day and read the article it opened at. That chance finding of information is something we have to an degree lost with the internet, when we search on something we tend just to find information on that subject.

[Merkin]

Ahh. The perfect moment to put in a plug for serendipity. Various thinkers and writers with a concern for how creativity manifests itself point toward serendipity as a key component. Read this article and see if you don't agree that being open to new experience, just as described above, leads to discovery and expanded understanding, which in turn leads to enhanced creativity. Isn't that what all art strives for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity

[DesDownunder]

Several thesaurus programs, I use WordWeb, can redirect to online dictionaries and Wikipedia. Wiki should be consulted with a questioning attitude, but as a starting point it is very useful. Then there is the minefield of Googling for references. All of these provide so much more than a paper dictionary. Learning to approach online information with a degree of scepticism is itself the means to expand understanding to more than just a definition. Remember that you can question Wiki and Google, and find disparate opinions, which help to put understanding into a useful perspective.

[The Pecman]

I'm a huge fan of Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, and have contributed quite a bit to Wikipedia.

As a kid, I spent many, many happy weekends in the library, reading hundreds (more like thousands) of reference books. Growing up, my sister and I read the encyclopedias in our home many times. I'm guessing I read the entire World Book Encyclopedia at least 20 or 30 times, maybe more. I'm very sad that reference books have been one of the first big casualties of the modern digital era.

What is sad today is that modern-day kids take online searches for granted, and don't grasp how difficult research was to do back in the "analog" days. It used to be, when you were assigned a book report or a thesis on (say) a foreign country, it'd take days of going to a library, checking out a variety of books, painstakingly hand-writing quotes, creating footnotes, and all that stuff. Now, too many kids think cutting-and-pasting is the equivalent of writing... but teachers are very wise to this, and have ways of checking their students' work and forcing them to do real research.

I have to say, Google Street View has made a big difference in the way I write my stories, in that I think about time, distance, and transportation differently now than I would 10 years ago. Before, if I wrote a story about a specific area, I think it'd be mandatory to go to that place and physically walk around there to get a real feel for what it was like. Now, I think you can get pretty close to that just with the resources online.

This doesn't quite cover cultural reference per se, but one thing I will observe: you can trap yourself if you include references to current music, TV shows, or movies in your work, because it tends to date it. This works with a period piece (like with my first novel, set in 1968-1969), but isn't so good for a contemporary story. The cultural references get dated very quickly. I know of quite a few TV sitcoms that suffer from this problem, since they're making jokes about George Bush (I and II), Ronald Reagan, and a lot of other issues that may go over the heads of 2013 audiences.

I won't name the show, but I once worked on a TV show where we had to painstakingly remove some cultural references, chiefly shots of the Twin Towers from New York, after 9/11. The producers and network were terrified of showing the buildings in reruns, because this would remind the audience that the show was shot prior to 2001. It cost a small fortune to go through over 100 shows and replace every shot where you could see the buildings -- probably six or seven shots per episode.

[colinian]

...Unfortunately I think the internet takes away those choices and becomes a crutch for our developing thought processes. I remember when schools began to allow calculators and all of a sudden kids didn't know how to multiply and divide without one...

Where I went to intermediate school (a.k.a. middle school) and high school we couldn't use calculators on tests. If you didn't know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, or calculate a square root you were hosed. Kids learned early on that the best way to use a calculator would be to check your manually calculated answers to make sure you didn't screw up somewhere. Those who didn't learn that lesson struggled and ended up having to get tutoring at school or go to Kumon or one of the other private tutoring centers.

Colin

[Nigel Gordon]

Ahh. The perfect moment to put in a plug for serendipity.

Somewhere I should have a shirt with "Serendipity Rules OK", must dig it out. If I can't find it I'll get a new one printed.

[Paul_and_Paco]

Some of us under eighteen do not text. Heck, I only have a cell phone for emergencies! The internet is great for some things, but I get better information from asking my uncle about the really important stuff.