[lbo-talk] Thesis, antithesis, thesis! ...

Sean Andrews cultstud76 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 15 18:31:15 PST 2006


On 11/15/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Information overload (or perhaps its social/historical causes) is
> perhaps the central fact of contemporary culture. And despite all the
> attention devoted to it (but mostly either in professional journals or
> in rather parenthetical references in popular texts) it is regularly
> ignored in specific contexts.

agreed. But really, who has time to read all of that.

Doug neer has answered my question of what
> he learns from watching tv that I remain ignorant of. He merely blew it
> off as riiculous. But there is so much repetition, redundancy, overlap,
> whatever in modern culture that one loses almost nothing by being
> innocent or mostly innocent of broad swatches of it.
>

I suppose it depends on who you have to communicate with on a regular basis. Knowing about contemporary pop culture, degraded and redundant as it is, is essential to making this point to people who are immersed in it (for instance, 18-22 year old students). As redundant as it may be, like a virus, it does mutate ever so slightly from time to time, and the less you are articulating your message with a nod to those mutations, the more you sound like a grumpy codger moaning about the way it used to be (which isn't to say you sound that way but that it is the way people who are more well versed in the antics of Paris Hilton than the genius of Milton will hear it) and more like someone who knows what's up. It's a corrupt and juvenile form of authority to be sure, but that in itself says something about our age. I fully agree that the latter would probably be more fulfilling, but there isn't nearly as much cultural capital in it as there used to be. Ideally one could traffic in both. I guarantee it takes far less exposure to the former than the latter to become conversant, leaving you plenty of time for Lyric Poetry, etc. And if you don't have to talk to people or make salient points about current social and cultural conditions, it probably makes more sense to concentrate on the intricacies of the literary version of Paradise Lost rather than its quickening realization here on earth.

Then, of course, there's the guilty pleasures and the dimming hope that something on TV might be decent for a change. That's just a hard habit to break.

s



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