Give me your untruths, your lies, your misinterpretations -they're good for me

[unjapanologist]

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

At a certain point in this TED talk about video games, the speaker shows a video that includes what appears to be nighttime TV footage of soldiers shooting at something (you know, with those indistinct white blobs moving across a greenish black background). The images are accompanied by the following voice-over: "What troubles me is not that video game violence is becoming more like real-life violence, but that real-life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game".

It's highly doubtful whether we can conclude such a thing from this one video fragment; there are exponentially more images of real violence that look very much like real violence and don't remind me of a video game in the slightest. There may be an edge of truth to the statement that "real-life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game", but on the whole, it simply isn't so.

That doesn't mean that sentence or the whole video are bad, though. It's an excellent sentence. It was fascinating enough to grab my attention and hold it long enough for me to go over to my blog and make a post about it, which means pretty damn fascinating, considering how lazy I am about posting. It's a very effective slogan. It isn't 'true' in the narrow, scientific sense of the word, but it contains a grain of truth that makes it interesting. Something in there resonated enough to get the audience (me) thinking about it, and isn't that what matters?

No declaration of any 'fact' can ever be entirely 'correct'. Having the largely-true there is the most important, but we need the bits that are half-true, and the bits that are only true under very specific conditions, and even the bits that are patently untrue. Whatever gets our brains in gear. In the course of my research, I'm probably going to end up saying a lot of things that are only somewhat true. Which is just fine, so long as they make you and I think.