>bitch wrote:
> >
> >
> > Nonetheless, *I* don't have to pay attention to him, on the principle of
> > there are more important things and a phenom. called information overload.
>
>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. 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.
>
>Carrol
Well, there's a thing called a division of labor. What might be more important for me, I might have said, was paying attention to, say, advice columns to examine the sexism, heterosexism, etc therein. (That's not something I do, but I do attend to other bits of pop culture.) I think Doug's point is not so much that we much pay attention to everything. Rather, it's that we shouldn't dismiss those who are laboring in another realm of cultural analysis. Occasionally,someone has jumped into the fray here to say, "What are you people talking about game shows and sex and stuff? That's just mere pop culture! There's real work to be done!"
I can't recall where you stand, but you seem to be likely to live and let live, refusing to dole out any judgment on the issue, even though you have little interest in it. Do I have that right?
But to those who think it's a waste of time, I'm not so sure. I was stunned one day when I whipped off some quickie post talking about the way gender is sold to us -- specifically the way the market destabilizes gender identities -- thrives on the disintegration of gender roles as they used to call them and celebrates gender bending, gender queerness, etc. -- only to re-establish the need to "fix' gender by selling us consumer goods that tell us and others who we are as gendered beings.
No biggie to us on the list. Old news. Yawn. But damn wasn't it a bit of enlightenment to a bunch of readers who'd never thought of it that way. I think of this as a bit like tilling the soil, preparing people to come to that point you often describe, where you say you were a Marxist before you ever knew the word. (sumpin' like that.) it's in those small bits of learning, when I think about my own intellectual development, that brought me to that same point.
"the sanctimonious Bitch | Lab, a multi-degreed asswipe who writes a tedious blog of regurgitated theory..."
-- Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon