That's a bit of hyperbole on my part. But I did recently hear someone whom I think knows a thing or two about the subject issue a not-unlike indictment of the state of cultural affairs. Culture has been in a headlong tailspin since the mid-twentieth century, she lamented, and she's sorry that this is what we've been left to work with.
I beg to differ. If only because of the sheer volume of information that’s available to us—literally at our fingertips—we are living in the most diverse, dynamic cultural period yet.
Granted, it's nearly impossible to compartmentalize the cultural sphere in a postmodern world, particularly after the explosion of digital technologies in the last decade. That wasn’t a death knell, but a signal of evolution.
Culture today is a kaleidoscopic vision, fragmented into a thousand pieces, constantly shifting, expanding outwards, various forms spontaneously intersecting and collaborating before evolving again, all within a decentralized power structure.
In short, it's a minor revolution.
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The purpose of this blog is to document in that evolution/revolution as manifested in New York City, my home turf. This blog is my breadcrumb trail tracing my discoveries, my encounters, my revelations. It is also an entirely subjective catalogue of the best references I can find for information on goings-ons within NYC's fringe culture—the locus of my interest.
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I realize that this all sounds very high-flautin’ and I hope you’ll bear with me. A majority of my future entries are going to be very grounded in actual events and experiences, informative and hopefully entertaining. But that doesn’t mean the occasional waxing poetic won’t slip in… every once and a while.
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2 comments:
I believe that this woman is speaking of the death of culture as we once knew it. Many things are now dead, history in the Hegelian sense for example.
You are right that culture is now fragmented but the statement also points to the fact that culture is no longer connected. I disagree with you in your assumption that we live in the most diverse, dynamic cultural period yet simply because the elements of culture are so limited and closed minded. Everything follows a rigid format so clearly defined and so clean that anything that strays outside of the format or dares to function off of raw intuition is marginalized and then swallowed up in our ocean of zeros and ones.
We live in a world where all the things that made past cultures magical are rendered nonexistent by our obsessive-compulsive sanitizing and streamlining. The information may be at our fingertips but let's be honest about what the internet is used for- the masses use Internet culture for internet culture and not as an all encompassing encyclopedia of world culture.
There is no revolution in your description of culture as a kaleidoscope. What you've described is an orbit and revolution implies travel. The orbit always ends up repeating itself and never makes a revolution in the sense of freedom but only makes revolutions in the sense of revolving and looping and repeating forever and ever. That is all our culture of blogs, profiles, and file sharing will ever be able to do.
But do you not think that these limited and closed minded elements of society, and the rigidity of it and people's attitudes towards it, are simply a new culture taking over from an old one. Even though culture as we once knew it is in the process of dying, if not dead already, they new cultures are simply replacing them. So culture as a whole cannot be deemed 'dead' because although individual aspects of it may be, they are constantly being renewed. Culture is defined as 'all the knowledge and value's shared in a society', and so it is technically impossible for culture to ever die.
I do agree that there is not really a revolution, but the fact that our current cultures have evolved from past cultures, i think just shows the continuous and ever-changing, immortal nature of a culture.
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