Comments (0) My fascination with the tribemen on the ground eventually led me to to this site:
http://savageminds.org/2008/07/01/are-there-uncontacted-tribes-the-short-answer-no/
As is typical on the internet, people are arguing about words instead of doing something proactive. More harm than good? I think not. Sounds like a little bit of professional jealousy and nitpicking if you ask me.
I’ve said for a while that the Internet tends to isolate us, and our opinions, from other people and their beliefs. I believe it’s in the way the Internet was designed. I think Eli Pariser, president of MoveOn.org, does as well.
I suppose one could always look for the opposing view, which is rarely offered. Using the system is definitely something that relies on the individual fighting their own instinctual tendency, but I think he skirts the root of the problem which has to do with the nature of search and retrieval systems themselves – the main way we deal with the Internet. We find what we are looking for, and by extension, people who share our views and places that reinforce them. So fighting that tendency is not only fighting human nature, it’s fighting the nature of the network itself.
If the comments are anything to go by, some people are threatened to the point of anger by this article, which seems to criticize their perfect totem. Another example of the kind of tribal microculture that has become so prevalent in the world.
MLK’s ‘Dream’ speech should not be in the public domain, no matter it’s historical significance. One man wrote that speech – Dr. Martin Luther King. There is no real reason for the state (the public) to seize that property. How is it in the public interest, how does it feed the public good? The speech is widely available in it’s original form and copyright protects it’s integrity. If it wasn’t copyrighted, Fox News could rearrange it at will and rewrite history in the minds of half the population. Pampers could make a video about having a dream about a dry butt. Want to see MLK selling Viagra? It would happen. Quickly the speech could lose meaning as it became not a product, but a thousand products. As it is, they would get sued. Which is in the public good.
Ever see a commercial feature a song that you know had meaning to tons of people, real meaning in their memories, and it’s altered and used to sell air fresheners or deodorant? In a lot of cases that’s because it’s owned by a group of people – a corporation. If the ‘public’, the biggest group of all, owns something, it really gets the treatment. It loses all meaning and before long nobody even knows what it is or where it came from. Think about all those old melodies from a hundred years ago that everyone has heard but nobody knows more than a snatch of, the public doesn’t know what it is, and they don’t care. The public domain is a graveyard. Copyright maintains the integrity and definition of works and keeps our cultural landscape from turning into a mess of nothing.
The prevalent cultural trends of the 20th century were ‘bottom up’ from a societal perspective. The resonant and strengthening contributions to culture came from the ‘bottom’ of the traditional social order, the working classes, the outcasts, and those at the geographical fringes. They created great swathes of culture unique to their time, pop music, blues, jazz, rock, Appalachian folk music, and the 60s-onward recycling of fashion from cast-offs in thrift stores, rummage bins, and dumpsters. This stemmed from and went in hand with the pervasive global ideas of egalitarianism, socialism and communism.
Throughout the later half of the century another trend developed – as the middle classes of America and Western Europe embraced, at least nominally, an egalitarian and globalizing culture, corporate interests supplied their needs in the mass market. Initially only commercializing what was already there, they moved to altering it more and more, until culture began to be created in boardrooms. So instead of a bottom up culture, we now have a top-down culture – a culture that is fed to the people from a central source, with a variety of messages that reinforce the status quo. Unlike the medieval top-down culture of the church or the enlightenment top-down culture of the aristocracy, this culture is the 21st century culture of capitalism at it’s zenith.
In America, where previously vast regional differences gave rise to vital and turbulent subcultures, there is no more culture/subculture social structure, consisting of a variety of cultures in geographic regions, held together by some common threads. In it’s place is the proverbial ‘monoculture’, divided into groups defined by their choice of product and those product’s associated value systems. Geographic divisions remain only inasmuch as it takes time to ship hard goods towards the middle of the country. This is a fine distinction, but valid.
Each group and it’s value associations creates for itself a virtual geography, choosing appearance, language, and ideology that delineates a space apart from other groups, expressed largely in electronic form. On the whole, this mode of operation and the overall conditions of living and working in global society create more similarities between ‘product-value groups’ than differences, so no group can rise as a threat to the corporate monoculture.
The so-called ‘alternative’ culture of the second half of the 20th century, the culture of Rock and Roll, Youth and Rebellion, doesn’t truly exist now, having been devoured by the mainstream long ago. Only the idea remains with it’s associated products, an idea receding into a subtle mythology where the false concept of a ‘commons’ made up of discarded corporate product has replaced a genuine culture that emanated from the creativity of the people. What we have now was cooked up by commerce alone, a backward-looking hybrid of cultural memories that is neither vital nor productive. It is the flipside of the same old cultural coin, an arbitrarily opposite answer to the same irrellevant question, a different lifestyle choice for the privelaged minority. Culture has been stolen from the people just as we had it in our grasp for what might have been the first time in history. How do we take it back?
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