With Jane away for a few days, I've been watching whole lot of television. With the warning that this post contains Lost spoilers if you haven't seen the episode aired last Wednesday here in the U.S. (titled "Something Nice Back Home"), one of the questions that I have is why the show's creators seem to be establishing Jack Shepard as the iconic leader figure in what seem to be the final moments before rescue, when leadership on the show has always been fluid -- emergent, even.
When Jack falls ill with appendicitis in the last episode, he's consumed with the idea that he's going to fail the survivors in the hour that they need him most. Even taking into consideration Matthew Fox's appropriately rugged good looks, it's always seemed strange that Jack has been held up so often as the key to survival for the island's habitants. We've seen a number of characters actually function as decision makers or influencers (Sawyer, Locke, Kate, Sayid, Ben, Juliet, Hurley, etc.) and I think its fair to say that just as often a new tent is set up and attacks are launched because the group, or some segment of the group, coalesces around a strategy.
I'm particularly intrigued by this idea of leadership on Lost because how groups manage to survive in a relatively confined and often hostile space is to me one of the more compelling themes of the series. Having the good-looking doctor serve as the "great man" of the island makes the whole business less interesting, I think. We know Jack is one of the Oceanic Six (though I'm entirely confused as to what that even means when we have a supposedly dead Charlie appearing to Hurley, etc.)
My bet? Jack's rendered entirely weak during the whole get-off-of-the-island process, which leads to some of them indeed making it off and ensuring that Jack's miserable as a result. Emergent leadership emerges victorious.
(Just posted this over on TechPresident, and I thought it was kinda interesting -- or, at least, interesting enough to justify crossposting it here. Speaking of
Lost, did Kate call the baby "Aaron" or "Eric"? I swear I heard Eric.)
Trolling the Internets today in an attempt to make some sense of last night's
perplexing Lost episode, I came across an idea that made me think, naturally, of a new way of understanding the tremendous amount of voter-generated content swirling
around the presidential campaigns right now.
The idea came from an
interview with two of the show's producers. They were quizzed about whether or
not it's safe for Lost fans to draw conclusions about the show's
core narrative from all of the related videos and games and other supra-show
stuff available online. In response, they drew a distinction between what's "in canon,"
as they put it, and what's not. The
mobisodes, short video clips distributed mainly via cell phone, are in canon.
The
Orchid video, a teaser film revealed at Comic-Con 2007, is too. But Find
815, an sort of online gaming experience, is not. (One potentially interesting
side note -- the producers' ideas on what is and isn't canonical differs from
those detailed on the community-created
Lostpedia wiki.)
Now, there's an obvious difference between the giant pile of Lost-related
content and the tremendous amount of content we're seeing generated around the
presidential campaigns -- particularly on the Democratic side and most notably
by the supporters of Barack Obama. In the show's case, a good deal of that content
is created by people working at or for HQ (aka NBC).
But there's something interesting happening on the political front where campaigns
are making decisions on what's "in canon" and what's not. And so we
end up seeing MySpace profiles cultivated by supporters co-opted by a campaign
and videos created by a Black Eyed Pea featured as the centerpiece of a candidate's
official email.
I can't say that I have any particular insights on this front yet. But it seems
to me to be an interesting way to think about a world where the distinction
between "official" and "unofficial" campaign materials doesn't
seem to cut it anymore. Maybe we should start exploring the idea that user-generated
content can be kinda official, "in canon" or not?
