culture waits
for no man.
I was talking about something being really broken with my niece and her boyfriend the other day, and I threw out the 'I can fix it, my dad's got an awesome set of tools' variation (of the more traditional 'Dude, my dad's a TV repairman; he's got an awesome set of tools, I can fix it.') and was met with polite smiles. They may have thought my dad really was a TV repairman.
They didn't make the connection because they'd never seen, and had almost never heard of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. My wife explained to them that it was the American Pie of the 80s, prompting nods and the boyfriend to observe, 'oh yeah, that guy that was married to Madonna's in it, right?'
I think all the time about the exponential growth of targeted media available to us, and the increasing rate at which it can be propagated, and mashed up, but I don't think it was made so obvious to me before how quickly it will now also be forgotten, if only because there's something new banging on the door of our attention. A hundred years ago, songs lived for generations because their method of propagation was so slow; families sang in church and at home, and that's how people learned them. Aside from the songs themselves, that 'residue' of cultural solidity has carried forward, and is likely what people in this country often feel tugging at them when they ponder the societal changes rushing toward them now, even if they can't articulate what it is they're afraid of losing. We hear all the time about external forces like demographics changing American culture, but we should probably consider our own actions that do so, and if concerned about baseball being supplanted by soccer, or the push for Spanish signs in public buildings as well as English, than we should think how we can make choices that reinforce what we want instead of grousing about how it's all going away. In an onslaught of new content, only that which is actively tended will remain, though that too will inevitably change.
Things I want woven permanently into our cultural fabric:
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
Parachute pants (purely as a warning)
Oingo Boingo
I was talking about something being really broken with my niece and her boyfriend the other day, and I threw out the 'I can fix it, my dad's got an awesome set of tools' variation (of the more traditional 'Dude, my dad's a TV repairman; he's got an awesome set of tools, I can fix it.') and was met with polite smiles. They may have thought my dad really was a TV repairman.
They didn't make the connection because they'd never seen, and had almost never heard of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. My wife explained to them that it was the American Pie of the 80s, prompting nods and the boyfriend to observe, 'oh yeah, that guy that was married to Madonna's in it, right?'
I think all the time about the exponential growth of targeted media available to us, and the increasing rate at which it can be propagated, and mashed up, but I don't think it was made so obvious to me before how quickly it will now also be forgotten, if only because there's something new banging on the door of our attention. A hundred years ago, songs lived for generations because their method of propagation was so slow; families sang in church and at home, and that's how people learned them. Aside from the songs themselves, that 'residue' of cultural solidity has carried forward, and is likely what people in this country often feel tugging at them when they ponder the societal changes rushing toward them now, even if they can't articulate what it is they're afraid of losing. We hear all the time about external forces like demographics changing American culture, but we should probably consider our own actions that do so, and if concerned about baseball being supplanted by soccer, or the push for Spanish signs in public buildings as well as English, than we should think how we can make choices that reinforce what we want instead of grousing about how it's all going away. In an onslaught of new content, only that which is actively tended will remain, though that too will inevitably change.
Things I want woven permanently into our cultural fabric:
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
Parachute pants (purely as a warning)
Oingo Boingo
posted by jim at 8/03/2006 12:42:00 PM
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