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youtube
I'm feeling very ambivalent towards youtube these days. Since google decided to buy the less-than-year old phenom, I've been pondering it's uses and it's new found role in our culture.
On one hand, it has changed everything, giving us access to millions of videos, adding context to news blogs, magazines, etc. We can watch old episodes of favorite shows, see why Jack Black is funny, or replay a particular scathing opinion piece by Keither Olbermann, or a funny bit by Stephen Colbert. Slate.com is infinitely more interesting with links to outside context such as videos on youtube, and is an excellent example of how the web can be harnassed by future journalists, and may just be how the industry adapts and finds its place in the future. We also have been given the ability to make millions of home made videos, some of which are histerically funny, creative, and worth sharing.
The downside that I've realized is that our culture has almost completely lost our ability to tell good from bad. We can surely voice our opinion, many do so quite rudely in fact, but this isn't quite what I'm getting at. As a culture, we have now allowed lonelygirl and "hey kid I'm a computer" become prominent members of our shared culture. These may fade quickly, but to be replaced by what? When Andy Warhol stated that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, I don't think he really knew how right he would be. This raises several more questions. Do we really need access to all this information? Is it worth it? More has been produced in the last 50 years, in terms of writing and music, than in all of history prior to that. At this rate, who knows, maybe in the last 10 years! It's going to get to a point where the overabundance of crap completely kills our ability to make aesthetic judgements. This is scary, but I don't think that most of us can even comprehend such a thing. We're all already tained, myself included. It is heartening to see the masses take control of distribution and production, making films music (and blogs), yet at the same time disheartening, as most of us are turning out shit which will eventually choke us all.
The etimologically, the word fame descneds to us from the ancient Greeks, and was meant to refer to those whose memory would outlast them. Heroes, such as Achilles, Hector, Ajax, great thinkers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato, etc. Simply being well-known during ones life, essentially running in large social circles, is not 'fame' in the true sense. This is worth keeping in mind. The cult of celebrity, in large part a cultural reaction to techinology, has merely appropriated motion pictures and mass-market print to serve the function religion/myth once served. These celebrities, like our art, are temporary. On some level, Alan Bloome is correct. (I think we should diversify the cannon to include eastern classics as well, such as the Tao te Ching, the I Chine, the Vedas, the poetry of Rumi, Basho, master Dogen's writings, etc, but should focus on works who have established their literary worth.) There is something to be said for any work which can survive for centuries. Of course many great works have been lost for a variety of reasons, but I doubt very much that anything has survived that shouldn't have. This is of course a tricky thought-experiment, as any work which has survived for so long has surely influenced our culture and thus we are too biased to judge whether something 'should' or 'shouldn't' have survived. But that's sort of the point, no?
So, to conclude this rant, although I think there is great potential for distribution via the internet sans the corporations, I am fearful that the flood of crap being produced by the masses will so deteriorate our culture that we will no longer be able to recognize that such a thing as good and bad even exist as objective classifications of aesthetic worth.
On one hand, it has changed everything, giving us access to millions of videos, adding context to news blogs, magazines, etc. We can watch old episodes of favorite shows, see why Jack Black is funny, or replay a particular scathing opinion piece by Keither Olbermann, or a funny bit by Stephen Colbert. Slate.com is infinitely more interesting with links to outside context such as videos on youtube, and is an excellent example of how the web can be harnassed by future journalists, and may just be how the industry adapts and finds its place in the future. We also have been given the ability to make millions of home made videos, some of which are histerically funny, creative, and worth sharing.
The downside that I've realized is that our culture has almost completely lost our ability to tell good from bad. We can surely voice our opinion, many do so quite rudely in fact, but this isn't quite what I'm getting at. As a culture, we have now allowed lonelygirl and "hey kid I'm a computer" become prominent members of our shared culture. These may fade quickly, but to be replaced by what? When Andy Warhol stated that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, I don't think he really knew how right he would be. This raises several more questions. Do we really need access to all this information? Is it worth it? More has been produced in the last 50 years, in terms of writing and music, than in all of history prior to that. At this rate, who knows, maybe in the last 10 years! It's going to get to a point where the overabundance of crap completely kills our ability to make aesthetic judgements. This is scary, but I don't think that most of us can even comprehend such a thing. We're all already tained, myself included. It is heartening to see the masses take control of distribution and production, making films music (and blogs), yet at the same time disheartening, as most of us are turning out shit which will eventually choke us all.
The etimologically, the word fame descneds to us from the ancient Greeks, and was meant to refer to those whose memory would outlast them. Heroes, such as Achilles, Hector, Ajax, great thinkers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato, etc. Simply being well-known during ones life, essentially running in large social circles, is not 'fame' in the true sense. This is worth keeping in mind. The cult of celebrity, in large part a cultural reaction to techinology, has merely appropriated motion pictures and mass-market print to serve the function religion/myth once served. These celebrities, like our art, are temporary. On some level, Alan Bloome is correct. (I think we should diversify the cannon to include eastern classics as well, such as the Tao te Ching, the I Chine, the Vedas, the poetry of Rumi, Basho, master Dogen's writings, etc, but should focus on works who have established their literary worth.) There is something to be said for any work which can survive for centuries. Of course many great works have been lost for a variety of reasons, but I doubt very much that anything has survived that shouldn't have. This is of course a tricky thought-experiment, as any work which has survived for so long has surely influenced our culture and thus we are too biased to judge whether something 'should' or 'shouldn't' have survived. But that's sort of the point, no?
So, to conclude this rant, although I think there is great potential for distribution via the internet sans the corporations, I am fearful that the flood of crap being produced by the masses will so deteriorate our culture that we will no longer be able to recognize that such a thing as good and bad even exist as objective classifications of aesthetic worth.
posted by tno at 03:57
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