Your a bum, your a punk, your a no lousy drunk....and your excessive blogging and interacting in the web 2.0 world is killing culture.
Culture hasn't just begun to die, has it? Am I not, by the very act of 'thinking' about this, utilizing a part of my intellect, my ability to use my own 'individual' intuition(ok, that might be a stretch--no exit right) that helps to secure the structure that holds up our 'culture'. Or, as Andrew Keen says, am I just looking for others like myself, the mirrors in the mirror, to pat my endeavors and ideas on the back; minus the challenges of said ideas--those challenges being the thing that actually certifies the structure of our 'cultural growth' is legitimate in the first place. I'm not even sure where I'm going with this. "Legitimate' to who anyway? Who decides what culture is?
Or is culture just in a perpetual state of re-inventing itself.
Andrew Keen's new book named The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Culture" brings up some interesting points and like many of the current social discussions being offered up these days, I'm late to the table. It seems like this is being discussed around and for some time. I just saw an interview of Andrew Keen on PBS's Business Nightly News this evening and thought the concept warranted further investigation.
Why am I bothering at all? I haven't even read the book so I can't go full steam with this. Whose approval am I seeking? What is this need to post my pseudo-opinions, awfully ill-informed and poorly prepared as they are indicative of the need for self-exposure to the world; the very reflection I seek in the mirror of web 2.0 is my own nodding mug.
Then again, I remember one of Keen's concerns was about the anonymity provided to those who are reckless with web 2.0, the bad ones, the culture devourers.
The 'youtuber's, 'my spacer's and the army of vapid bloggers who have lost the ability to read, somehow. Do we need to know every day what kind of toothpaste some schmuck uses or in the perpetual surveying of my space(of which i am guilty also), what kind of cola or flavor of chocolate one favors.
No, nobody cares and in this fashion, the time it takes to write such things, make such foolish youtube.com videos, may take away from time better spent using the mind. Are these superfluous activities killing the Mozarts and the Picassos of our souls, this higher media and entertainment thus being the soul of our culture.
Amateurs who never develop into masters because they are so preoccupied with being amateurs, low level celebrities, 15-minute men and women drowning the 'class' of the world in their inane blog spots.
But then, what makes one creative and 'productive' may be to another a lesson in frivolity. One man's garbage, blah blah blecht.
Me, I am always exposing myself on the net, through my poetry, physically via pictures and here in the supposed mind numbed zone known as 'blog' world.
My brother used to asked me, who are you writing for, my poetry being at the heart of the question. I write for myself I'd demand, truly convinced it could be possible but in the end, I write for the imagined audience, full all of it with my very own likenesses and maybe a few of the people I seek approval from most, my family, my friends and my heroes in immortality(that place I long to be) I'd say, since every day and every night and every second of every minute I can still remember my name, I do everything for myself; inevitably.
Even in producing for the mirror, greatness can be born and culture propelled to new interesting places, no? Isn't culture just the conglomeration of the self's interaction with other variations of the self, the mosaic of our social activity when looked at up close, held together by the contributions of a million individuals dead, living and playing concertos at 5 years old. Can culture really be 'killed'?
Here, here I'm not being very anonymous, as far as the people who will visit this post almost all know me, anonymity, in my case, seems a bit of a mute point.
Okay, I've satisfied my reflection for now, still a bit undecided as of yet because hey, I haven't even read the book so how can I be conclusive about what I perceive Mr. Keen to mean(sister I'm a poet and yes, uh-huh, thats right, uh-huh, I know it--doing my best Fabu-lous meets Morrisey--now thats culture baby--thats entertainment).
I will change and save culture by reading
why it is that culture is possibly dying,
being killed no less; perhaps.
Alright, I'm so extremely tired, hoping there is some sense in here!!
live from the mutter museum,
here is the grotesque, twisted,
aberration of the our cultural soul,
for your voyeuristic, self-indulgent,
narcissistic, self aggrandizing delights,
here in this dirty old town called blog city;
Ladies and gentlemen--by which I mean, just ME,
The Mallet
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1 comment:
Keen's an elitist, pure and simple. Maybe elitism is a good thing. But I'd err on the side of less self-appointed gatekeepers of culture. Culture, says Raymond Williams in this regard, is a "whole way of life," not a discrete and inscrutable body of works, se3lected by a small sliver of society to represent the whole.
Great post, though. You're not that late to the game. Keen's book's only really been out for a few months (June?), and he's certainly responding to conversations that are current and raging. I think his is a good contribution, if reactionary. But then, I think Colbert is reactionary on just this point, and would probably tend to agree with Keen: the mob is wild and ungovernable, and no knowledge can come from the mob. This point is so easy to make that it makes me very suspicious, as if it may be something mob-like about knowledge itself that scares these people so much, and not the dreaded Nazi hordes coming to cast capital T Truth away in the relativism of the unruly crowd.
Whenever somebody notes that the "mob" is out of control, I start reaching for my wallet. Because the mob is me.
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