High School Fight Club, Following Footsteps of the Fiction?

I just read this article about some students at Fairview High School who have been coordinating and participating in an afterschool fight club. At least 12 students were actively involved (fighting), and it's estimated that there are about 60 individuals that attend the events altogether. The school board has already "ticketed" ten students who will need to make court appearances and may be suspended from school.

Morally, I don't have much problem with this little extracurricular activity the kids (aged 15-17) have started. As long as the ordeal is fairly friendly and things don't get out of hand, it's probably a healthier investment of time/energy than a lot of alternatives the participants/spectators could get involved with instead. But, these thoughts aren't particularly relevant at the moment.

As soon as I read the headline, "'Fight Club' Busted at Fairview High School", the first thing that popped into my head was Tyler Durden reading off the list of Fight Club rules to newcomers in Lou's Tavern. I considered the likelihood that the film (Fight Club, that is) wasn't an inspiration for the after-school group formed at Fairview High School, and I didn't guess the probability to be very high. A handful of the students most likely watched the movie, thought (rightfully so) that it was pretty cool, and then theorized how it would be even cooler if they started their own version.

I found the scenario to be somewhat relevant to my group's final project/presentation in IST 431, which might be (we have to work out this issue with another group that selected the same topic) about science fiction's role in predicting/determining future technologies. The juvenile fight club isn't any sort of technology, of course, but would it have come into existence if it wasn't first written about years before? Did the fiction cause the reality? Or, was the author just one of the first to come up with a concept that others would have inevitably arrived at, and publishing his idea for the masses did nothing more than speed up the process at which everyone else discovered it?

While I haven't come to a firm conclusion as to my stance on the topic in general (whether fiction causes things to happen, or if the things happen the same way even if the fiction had never existed), I think in this particular case, the idea was more predetermined. We've been fighting since the beginning of time, at first out of necessity and as a means to gain wealth (land, money, resources, etc.), and then later as a form of entertainment and sport. Fighting has been part of culture since, well...since we've had a culture. So, I don't find the fight club derivation to be particularly surprising, and it probably would have eventually happened even without the fiction.

However, if the object of concern was something more contradictory to human nature, or at least not innate to humans...let's say, mowing grass - the 60 students gathered in the old field behind the school after hours each week to cut and maintain the lawn - then I would say, "Yes! These children are behaving in such a way because they've all seen that new blockbuster, Grass Groupies!"

And I think this philosophy (hazy as it may be - apologies for the less-than-stellar examples) applies to technology as well...

Science fiction predictions involving technologies that were fairly predictable (like groups organized purely for the sake of fighting) probably didn't have much influence. Take the toaster. Sure, at one point, the thought of having a toaster that knew when bread was finished heating was probably far-fetched and futuristic. But, look at it from a toaster manufacturer's perspective. Maybe the competition is starting to pull ahead, and our company needs something new and revolutionary to get us back in the game. So, we sit and stare at a toaster. "How could this be improved?" we ask ourselves, "What is wrong with existing model? What would be a nice feature? What could we do better?" At some point, someone in the group would declare, "It should stop heating the toast when it's finished, so the user doesn't need to stand around watching it!" Even without any forward-thinking science fiction available, this should have eventually happened on its own.

On the other hand, technologies like using sound as a weapon (predicted by Brian Aldiss in the mid 1900's) are not as easily anticipated. Technologies that wouldn't be the result of a natural progression (see pop-up toasters), technologies that we would almost need to happen upon by accident to realize - these are the cases where science fiction is most valuable. If a scientist sees notices a strange behavior when certain chemicals are mixed or perhaps becomes aware of an unusual byproduct, then the individual may overlook great potential if he/she doesn't possess certain forward-thinking concepts to which connections can be made. These concepts might very well come from science fiction.

Well, this post came a long way from Fight Club. I think somewhere during the journey, though, I've cleared up my thoughts on the value of science fiction and its influence on future technologies. As a rule of thumb (subject to change, of course, as I consider the idea more), I would say that the more absurd and out-there the science fiction, the more impactful it could potentially be for the future. If it doesn't seem completely unrealistic, then it would have probably happened on its own.