Schoolhouse Rock [Slash] The World as We Know It
About eight months ago, I was hanging out with some of my cousin the revolutionary's friends when the conversation turned to Schoolhouse Rock.
"Have you watched them?" Codename Judy asked a friend. "They're musicals about things like conjunctions, or how a bill becomes a law. They're really funny. You should take a look."
I realized that Codename Judy was talking about YouTube.
Now, my cousin graduated this month, three years after I graduated. In demographic terms, that makes us both upstanding members of Generation Y, but, in college terms, that puts my cousin and his friends about a generation away from me. Which is to say, MCTR spent the majority of his college years in a post-YouTube world, and I spent the majority of mine in a pre-YouTube world.
A sociological rule of thumb is that technology invented before you were a certain age is commonplace and to be taken for granted, technology invented in your adult life is kind of cool and something you may be able to make a living at, and technology invented later in your life is foreign, alien, not to be trusted and certainly not worth understanding.
I had one of my post-take-it-for-granted moments during this conversation.
Schoolhouse Rock is plausibly timeless in that it's catchy or educational no matter when you watch it, but ultimately it's a very iconic relic of the 1970s.
Up until now that meant that you had to either live through the '70s or go out of your way to watch Schoolhouse Rock. Now, you can watch it any time. Go ahead. It's right here.
Of course, it's not just Schoolhouse Rock. For the first time in history, we can experience the detritus (or at least the recorded television detritus) of any previous culture at any time. Which would mean I just went a long way to demonstrate a very simple point if it weren't for this fact's odd and far-reaching implications.
Like We Even Needed Another Victory For Postmodernism
I took a U.S. television history course at my high-pedigree school and we had a section on post-modernism.
For those of you who haven't been to college (or who have been to college but somehow avoided the idea of post-modernism, presumably by taking a lot of bio classes), postmodernism is the idea that in the present day, there is somehow so much information that we can't reliably run down a definition of anything. Or that there's so much change in the modern day that in a way you can't expect anything to go unchanged. Or it's a breakdown between the signifier and the signified. Or it's something else.
There's a million definitions of postmodernism (which is one of the most post-modern things about it, as my professor was fond of saying without irony). In television history, it's significant because no two people ever have the same experience with television, so there's no common understanding of what it is, or what it means, or its history.
Obviously, YouTube has some important implications here beyond the citizen journalism stuff you can go explore somewhere else, because for the first time we can access these obscure or outdated things whenever we want.
It's a direction television has been moving towards for awhile (rise of DVRs, etc.) I don't want to go in to it too much because there is, by definition, no end to how far you can take the idea of an increasingly postmodern world.
Culture as a Tap and Not a Resevoir
If everyone can access different aspects of culture at any time, maybe we need to think about culture differently, as more of a utility and less as a resource.
Take jokes. In the past, if someone (a comedian, say) made a reference to something, you either got it or you didn't. Humor was time and culture sensitive.
It still is, but now, if we hear a reference we don't understand, we can just google it. We might not get a joke quick enough to laugh, but we may get it the next time.
Take, for example, John McCain's comment (in a blogger conference call, significantly) that his Republican primary opponent Mitch Romney’s immigration plan might be to “get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard."
I was watching Stephanopoulos, and a panelist pointed out that the brilliance of that comment was that in referenced no less than two Romney campaign flaps in addition to his the actual point about immigration, leading everyone who talks about the comment to also explain those references in full and so spend a lot more time talking about Romney's problems than McCain had to.
Remember how I was talking last week about how eidetic memory is the ultimate modern superpower? Maybe we don't really need it.
In the imminent future when all Americans can google whatever they want from their personal cell phones, what's the point of retaining information at all? Information changes all the time. What the best schools have already learned is that they need to teach understanding, techniques for learning, and a way to evaluate the relative value information much more than they need to convey the information itself.
It's one difference I also notice between my generation and older ones. We seem to have an almost instinctual understanding of the kind of information on the internet.
It isn't instinct, of course, it's experience - we search casually all the time - but I'm so conditioned to it that it's strange to watch my parents look for information without the internet. It's like another world - a world before google. [via Absurd Notions]
Brangelina: Another Drawback to Random Access
Another weird thing is that there's also a leak factor here. Random access means that bullshit information is written right next to good information, and that characteristic holds true just as well for culture as it does for computers.
Example: around when Teti lambasted me for not knowing offhand the definition of DRM, I just some stupid idea that I ought to be reading the big blogs. Anyway, as a New Yorker, I decided one of the significant ones was Gawker.
Anyway, after a few months, I just had to give Gawker up. I had been trying to figure out why I knew more celebrity gossip than I had at any previous time in my life, and I realized as I clicked back through whatever the hell was going on with Lindsay Lohan at the time that Gawker was probably why.
I was never trying to seek out information on celebrity marriages. I was casually following some series of references and it just happened to me. I still feel like I can't get away from it - I know that Brad is having trouble with Angelina. It's just that this useless, waste of time information is sandwiched next to the good information, like the copy of The Economist next to US Weekly at a newsstand.
I Am Next to You
Okay, I'm coming up on my last point, and it involves a little geography lesson.
Manhattan is an island. Horizontal space is limited. This means that, where in a city like San Antonio, we would build out in to ever-expanding borders, in New York everyone built up.
As a result, New York has always had a lot of people living in a geographically small space that was easy to get around. This led to a thriving regional specialty in all things niche.
Let's say that one in 1,000 people is interested in anime in 1995. In San Antonio (pop. 1,000,000), that's 1,000 people spread all over the city. In New York (pop. 8,000,000), there's not only 7,000 more people interested in anime, they are in a much smaller geographical area, and it's much easier for them to get to an anime store.
So when I came to New York for one of the first times to visit my friend Josh, he introduced me to a bunch of anime that it turned out was really interesting, and which I never would have heard about if it wasn't for my trip to the city.
By concentrating a large market on an island, New York allowed specialty vendors to thrive - which helped increase interest, which spurred the sellers, etc.
Result: New York has consistently been one of the few places in the world where you can pretty much buy anything at any price. And, more than that, it concentrated a community of like-minded people in to a space where they had greater access to each other.
The point is that the internet has lowered our barriers to entry to particular cultures or interests to just time and search capabilities. The niche thrives on the internet. We can find support for a particular cause, like-minded people or markets for niche products almost without any effort.
Random Access ribbles
Whenever I get to the end of one of my Big, Long Essays That Take Forever to Write I feel like I've taken a lot of trouble to explain something very simple.
There would be no way to give this kind of an explanation without the internet - just look at the number of links in this post alone. I'd still be thinking about these things, but the reason I like this medium so much is that I don't have to explain all my references, ideas and examples completely because I can just link to the appropriate information.
In a way (and once again, this is by no means a new idea) this means that we each have access to an entirely new medium to express ourselves. But it also means that there is no end to the depths of the trivial we can explore (for example, after this I fully intend to write about either Manu Ginobili, the weather or my cat.)
It would be one thing if I were spurring the country to a new national debate, but I suspect no one reads these things, but Johnny took his blog, arguably just a series of rants on National Ice-cream Day, and turned it in to a job at The Daily Show, so maybe there's hope for me yet.
Maybe I should send Gawker a resume...
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