Some writers still use the words “Pop Culture” as if they were considering a present and abiding thing.
Sadly, the entity formerly known as Pop Culture has been dead now for (conservatively) fifteen years, and what we are doing today is picking and licking at its bones.
By definition and by name, Popular Culture was the power of art, music and media to unite masses of people in a single moment: to coalesce whole generations, and numbers of generations, even if individuals lived miles (or years) apart, even if they never met one another. To share the same love of music, film, radio, television or print, was to be connected beyond age or geography, beyond social standing, beyond clan, beyond blood. Pop Culture was a glue that bound us all, if not to the same page, at least to the same volume.
But it’s clear now to anyone with eyes that Pop Culture was a fleeting phenomenon of the twentieth century, born of the rotary press and murdered by “the global system of interconnected computer networks” — a by-product industry and invention, ultimately killed by the same forces.
Moveable type, the typewriter, the Linotype machine, the development of photography, telegraphy and telephony, then moving pictures, radio and talkies, then television, all drew us closer to one another and helped shatter the boundaries of space and time. At first, the internet held more of the same promise. Instead, a strange thing happened. All of us, alone in our little rooms, clutching our devices, were offered more and still more to choose from than ever before — and we chose so-called social media and began shrieking at one another. Art was reduced to Content. More and more “content” was needed, to be shoveled into the gaping, insatiable maw of the internet users. With thousands of choices being dumped on our heads, we stopped connecting to one another and started going our separate ways.
Nor can we any longer even approach a commonality of standards. The art of criticism died early on as access media required that critics become nothing more than promoters. As blogs and YouTube gave a platform to anyone and everyone to spew out their often ill-informed opinions, objectivity fell by the wayside.
It seems now that the last act of a Popular Culture in its Death Throes was to transform some of us into the Peter Ustinov character from LOGAN’S RUN: dotty old codgers doing what little we can to save the culture that made our lives worthwhile from the ruins of Time. We create and conserve our own worlds now, living off the bits and bytes that come our way. Pop Culture is dead. We live today in the age of Personal Culture.
And Personal Culture comes with a Responsibility: We are now the curators, program directors and librarians in our own lives. And we have an obligation to ourselves to not accept whatever dross the suited corporate clods choose to make available to us on this or that individual streaming service. You are what you eat, and that includes the culture that you consume. Here at the end of Popular Culture, we must take control of what we put into our heads just as we control what we put into our stomachs.
Dump Netfix.
Dump Disney.
Dump Paramount.
Dump them all. You don’t need them. They won’t keep you healthy.
It is YOUR CHOICE: What I’m telling you is the same old advice everyone gives about choices: make yours mindfully.
Take up the reins and become your own Programming Director. Do it With Intent and Purpose. Technology has made it possible for each of to create our own Streaming Service. Over the next few posts (likely coming at an exceeding irregular pace) , I’m going to tell you how I do it, and how easy it is. Mine is just one way of many. I will try to point you in the direction of multiple solutions. Because Taking Control of your culture is not only good for you — it’s fun, too.
As TV announcers used to say, “Don’t Touch That Dial! We’ll be Right Back!”
-- Thorn.
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