If you want to be a popular blogger--which I used to be, relatively speaking and within my niche, five years ago---don't close and open blogs and hop around like I do. However, if you want to write publicly but feel that you are somewhat under the radar, feel free.
It's not entirely an illusion. Words on the internet are as plentiful and frequent as rain on Glasgow. After twenty years of falling, the accumulated words are a vast, unplumbable ocean. Even a targeted Google search by a friend or foe would bring them to the edge of the murky rock pool that is twelve years of my own online writing.
While I was an undergraduate, I lived in a student co-op house for a memorable year, and on the floor below mine was a plump M.A. candidate who read James Joyce and smoked dope. Still overly impressed by graduate students, I mistook Oren for an oracle.
"History," he pronounced during one of our rare conversations, "is text."
A lifelong diarist, I thought those were the truest words I had ever heard that side of campus. They continued to sink into my brain, even when, two or three years after I left the house, Oren said they were complete nonsense. Hadn't I noticed how much dope he had smoked?
Yeah, but traditionally pagan oracles were usually stoned one way or another, wern't they?
Many years later, possibly after I met B.A., I understood that history is also cultural artefacts. I wished I had done a better job, as a diarist, in describing the material objects that would differentiate the 1970s from the 1980s, the 1980s from the 1990s, and so on.
One of the problems, perhaps, is that one does not know which fishes to catch in one's diaristic nets. (How did I know in 1985 that I would want to recreate it in words in 2015?) And then, of course, I gradually lost interest in pop culture, at first lagging behind, but then ignoring it completely. This may be normal for adults, especially childless ones. In 1985, I could had a good idea of the Top 10 hits of the given day. In 2018, I have no idea at all, unless "Believer" by the [Something] Dragons is still there.
I know about "Believer" only because of "Riverdale", and I know about "Riverdale" only because a disaster befell the Historical House and B.A. and I were temporarily rehoused in a flat furnished with Netflix. And being prone to sudden obsessions, I have binge-watched "Riverdale" and gone online to read what other watchers think of it.
Suddenly I feel like Rip Van Winkle, woken up to a new world. Those who were babies when I fell asleep to pop culture are now grown up and writing in a strange jargon, often with a brutal frankness that is crudely obscene. They trade in a host of references to television shows and movies that I have never heard of, let alone watched. I have discovered that Facebook is "for old people", and I suspect blogging is, too. History is no longer text (if it ever was) but digital photographs, digital films, digital music.
This is why, by the way, I stopped giving advice to Singles. My hermeneutic was that human nature doesn't change, and so my experience as a Single adult in the 90s and 00s could be helpful to Singles now. However, I am no longer sure about this because I know that constant attention to digital culture--bathing in music and images and hieroglyphic text speak--rewires the human mind, making the human brain physically different from that of the human being who works by hand, reads, chats to acquaintances in his favourite brunch cafe, and occasionally puts a record on a turntable.
To paraphrase the Buggles, Tinder killed the internet star.
I know also that the very powerful people who direct the digital culture are deliberately trying to change human nature, to bring about the "equality of outcome" that Jordan Peterson is so afraid of.* They seem to think truth is not what is, but what you make it, and they are determined to make truth what they think it should be. This is extremely frightening.
Digital culture preaches a message of tolerance and respect for difference, but only those differences that are compatible with its own overarching worldview. On "Riverdale", Jughead is corrected for "telling a story that is not his to tell" after he writes indignantly of the massacre of the Native American tribe who used to live where Riverdale is now. But on the most recent episode of Riverdale, yet another character has been dragged against her will to a Roman Catholic home run by Roman Catholic nuns, this time to undergo conversion therapy.
Dear Hollywood, dear Entertainment Industrial Complex, you're performing conversion therapy on us.
I am caught up on all the episodes "Riverdale", and will do my best not to think of it again until Thursday, when the next episode reaches the UK, via Netflix. I'm kind of amazed that, here I am, in synch with a contemporary, still-developing artefact of American pop culture.
Although in the UK, I watch mostly boring television with B.A. (mostly cooking shows and "Sherlock" when it appears), being plugged into something mainstream aimed at, and performed by, American Millennials feels really different. Although "Riverdale" has distracted me from objectively more valuable pursuits, I feel strangely awake.
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