Through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes
I can barely define the shape of this moment in time
-Roger Waters – The Final Cut
In an effort to make my pop-culture subject into an observable object, I’ve become obsessed with trying to determine the overall shape and flavor of the past 10 years of pop culture. We all have an immediate sense of what the phrase “the sixties” means, just like we all know what we mean by “the seventies,” “the eighties”, and “the nineties”—each decade having particular cultural and artistic elements that comprise our overall sense of “zeitgeist” for that era.
But the 00′s have been somewhat different, and our current pop-culture identity considerably more difficult to pin down.
Now, some may say that I can’t yet see the shape of the previous decade because I am still too close to it, like a fish trying to notice the water I’m swimming in. And to some extent I agree—but at the same time, I’m pretty sure I had a sense of “what the nineties were” as early as 1997, and I’d wager that someone ten years older than me could probably say the same about the eighties back in ’87.
Others may say that the whole “culture by decade” concept is clunky, contrived, a lazy linguistic convenience that has no real bearing on music, film, fashion, or any other flavor of the nunc fluens. Which is fair, but ignores the fact that we need some way to frame our perceptions of cultural narrative, and the calendar is just as useful as any other. Plus, it kind of undermines my premise, and shall henceforth be ignored.
There are two techno-economic forces that have made the 00′s radically different than preceding decades, two so-called “disruptive technologies” that have brought the mainstream music industry into the greatest legitimacy crisis it’s ever experienced in its almost century-old existence.
First, the internet. We’ve seen a major decline of the musical mainstream in the 00′s, as the internet has effectively decentralized music distribution as we know it. In the wake of the internet, MTV has become another “reality TV” station, VH-1 a non-stop nostalgia machine, and FM radio an endless, homogenized rotation of the same 20 songs. As music was becoming increasingly decoupled from the material world of packaging, retail, and physical location, the circulatory system of the musical mainstream began to breakdown. Napster may have been the first nail in the coffin, and Pirate Bay the most recent—but the music industry was already digging its own grave when it refused to adapt to the inevitability of life in the 21st century. The industry wasn’t brought down by piracy, it forced piracy.
Second, the rise of the iPod revolution. Coming of age in the relative vacuum of a declining music industry, the iPod is largely responsible for one of the most significant transitions in the history of pop-culture. No longer do we share a single centrally-controlled cultural zeitgeist, at least insofar as music is concerned. There is now a different zeitgeist for every iPod.
Taken together, these two forces have had a profound effect upon pop culture. Long gone are the days of television and radio as the predominant shapers of our shared pop-culture experience. It is becoming increasingly more organic, more relativized, and more difficult to control—especially as the internet slowly emerges from the perspectival sprawl of technological adolescence into a real self-organizing, pattern-making, pattern-breaking force of cultural connectivity.
But we’re not there yet. Among many other problems, we still have major issues with quality media becoming so easily lost in the noise of quantity. (I’m looking at you, YouTube.) In today’s virtual world, good taste often falls victim to the dramatic (and counter-intuitive) narrowing of information people end up actually experiencing online—one of the consequences of increasing options in infotainment in the midst of the breakdown of conventional mainstream channels.
Contrary to much of the techno-utopianism so prevalent in the late 90′s, the internet has done more to entrench our perspectives than it has to expand them. We now have different news sources for every different set of values—making more room than ever before for the most most radical extremes, with far fewer “neutral spaces” for mature, responsible debate. Even Google has begun customizing our experience of the web according to our own past behaviors, exposing us to ads and search results that are most aligned with our browsing history. The web has become our own personal house of circus mirrors, where it’s hard to see anything but our own grossly distorted reflections staring back at us.
In other words, we’ve seen the internet largely increasing the depth of the information that’s available to us—offering countless hours for us to geek out on pretty much any topic we can imagine—while decreasing the span of the types of information that we are actually exposing ourselves to. It’s true that the entire world is at our fingertips—but few are willing to type enough keywords to see it all.
(Interestingly, we’ve seen the inverse in terms of our online relationships, increasing the span of our interactions while decreasing the depth—e.g. amassing hundreds or even thousands of Facebook and Twitter friends, then using the “like” button on someone’s Facebook post as a substitute for genuine 2nd-person contact).
As a consequence of the deconstruction of media and simultaneous widening/narrowing of information, the burden of “good taste” is falling more and more upon us, the avid consumers of culture who are most passionate about sharing our own individual tastes, our own personal influences, and our own unique reflections on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of popular culture.
In his influential book The Tipping Point; Malcolm Gladwell describes two prominent types of cultural shapers—connectors and mavens:
“Connectors” are people who “link us up with the world… people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” If you have a Twitter or Facebook following of more than a couple hundred people, you are to some degree a connector.
The Yiddish word “maven” is used to describe “people we rely upon to connect us with new information”—those who stand in the convergence of multiple cultural streams and have cultivated enough trust to gather and disseminate new styles, tastes, and trends, as they emerge in real-time. If you are someone who puts a great deal of effort into trying to stay on the cutting edge of art, culture, and technology, you are most likely a maven.
In the year 2000, when this book was written, connectors and mavens were usually two different types of people. In 2010, I’d bet my left turntable that they are one and the same—or at the very least, if all connectors aren’t mavens, the majority of mavens have since become connectors.
So consider this a call to all you self-identified, digitally-connected, culturally-plugged-in mavens out there: Speak up! Share your passions! Let yourselves be counted among the aesthetic elite who are consciously shaping the twisted, beautiful “We” that we all share!
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
-Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy
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It’s not easy being an artist—especially if you are trying to make a living. It can seem at times as if the entire world is stacked against you, forcing you to compromise your vision or surrender it altogether in order to put food on the table. And while the internet has proven to be wonderful for consumers of art, it can be a bit of a double-edged sword for artists themselves. On the one hand, they can find new audiences from around the world that they may never have found otherwise. On the other hand, it seems that today it takes something truly extraordinary to cut through all the digital noise—and even when you do break through, you run an even greater risk of your work being copied, pasted, and distributed across the web. All the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a work of art can instantly evaporate into a fine mist of 0′s and 1′s.