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

[Sean Andrews]

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