Culture and …

  • A lot of lit­tle blog­wor­thy mus­ings on my second-favorite topic have been bounc­ing around my head. Given that Fr. Alexan­der observed “Every­thing in and of our cul­ture is about the King­dom of God, either for or against,” it may just be that these thoughts dove­tail with thoughts about my most favorite topic.

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    Cul­ture and … the art museum

    On my last visit to our ven­er­a­ble but mod­est Kansas City art museum, a museum guard gen­tly chas­tised me for using my cell phone. Now, not to be defen­sive, but the ring had been set to vibrate, and when the call I had been wait­ing for came in, I answered it in con­ver­sa­tional tones much more sub­dued than the peo­ple around me.

    It makes no mat­ter, I sup­pose. Rules are rules. The prob­lem I have with this kind of thing is that it con­tributes to the stuffy, air­less and slightly fussy ambiance that per­me­ates art muse­ums already. We’re enshrin­ing “high cul­ture” — all these bygone mas­ter­pieces by bygone mas­ters — at the same time that the “low cul­ture” of YouTube and digg and peer-to-peer review­ing and blogs is explo­sively organic and invites every­one to touch and see and smell and be engaged.

    It doesn’t mat­ter to me in terms of keep­ing art muse­ums around. They are amply funded by patrons and endow­ments, and if they have to down­size in the decades to come, they at least won’t dis­ap­pear in this gen­er­a­tion or the next. But they have ceased to be alive; they’ve stopped being the place where art hap­pens and started being the glass cof­fin that keeps it locked away where noth­ing can touch it.

    Chil­dren are duly carted in so they can be exposed to cul­ture, but how many of them really want to be there of their own free will? They rightly dis­cern, I think, that there’s very lit­tle of actual inter­est going on there, and mean­while their cul­ture is wait­ing for them as soon as they step out­side the doors of this mau­soleum.
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     … and the cell phone

    Not that I don’t under­stand the implicit dis­re­spect of a per­son talk­ing on the cell phone. There is some­thing basi­cally rude about a per­son dis­en­gag­ing from the peo­ple who are actu­ally around him in order to carry on a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one else.

    Right now, eti­quette — the socially accepted rules by which most of us abide in the name of cour­tesy and har­mony — has yet to include pro­vi­sions for cell phone use. This will change. Com­ing up with the social com­pact is one of the most nat­ural things that soci­eties do. But it won’t be for those of us 50 and older to come up with them. This will be under the purview of the Gen-X, Gen-Y crowd, and they prob­a­bly won’t do it for a while because they hate the idea of rules for any­thing. But if they don’t do it, it will be leg­is­lated, and that would be much worse.

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    … and Facebook

    I feel like I need to apol­o­gize to all the “friends” that I have on Face­book. (For those of you who don’t know, I have to put friends in quotes, because it means a cer­tain thing on Face­book.) I don’t feel like I’ve got the time to really stay in touch the way you’re sup­posed to on Face­book, but I also just don’t think I’ve got the hang of it.

    With great effort, I’ve held my list of “friends” down to about a dozen. It’s obvi­ous that if you didn’t expend that effort — and if you actu­ally exerted your­self to get lots of new friends — you could quickly get 50 or 60. And you could say ‘hi’ to all of them –or tell them you were bak­ing cook­ies, or ask them to play a game, or rec­om­mend a new sur­vey on what Stephen King mon­ster they were most like — at any time. And all 60 of them could do the same to you at any time, besides writ­ing you lit­tle mes­sages and start­ing lit­tle one-sentence conversations.

    Who in the world has the TIME to do this?? And who has the incli­na­tion? If you’re really doing the Face­book thing, isn’t your e-mail inbox con­stantly twit­ter­ing with tiny atoms of infor­ma­tion from oth­ers and demand­ing that you give atoms of infor­ma­tion about your­self? I’d think you’d barely have time to do any­thing because you’d be too busy telling all your friends what you just did.

    I don’t know what hap­pens to the nature of dis­course if this is what every­one accus­toms them­selves to. My rea­son for won­der­ing is self­ish, of course. I feel like I almost never get a chance to express myself in full sen­tences as it is (hence the self-centered inter­est in blog­ging). What chance do I have if I’m expected to keep it down to four-syllable sen­tences all day and night instead? Sounds exhaust­ing. ( — hey, three syl­la­bles. Good! :-) )

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    … and the chang­ing face of marketing

    I’ve been read­ing books by a New Mar­ket­ing guru named Seth Godin, and the changes he talks about are actu­ally inter­est­ing enough to pass on to peo­ple who don’t care about marketing.

    The thing is, we all know we’ve grown up in a world so sat­u­rated by adver­tis­ing that it’s almost become back­ground noise. TV com­mer­cials take up twice the time they did in the ’60s. Movies are typ­i­cally shown after 10–20 min­utes of adver­tise­ments, and good­ness knows you’re not free from unwanted solic­i­ta­tion either on the phone, your mail­box or your e-mail.

    Most of this is an intru­sion, which is why the whole model is now called ‘inter­rup­tion mar­ket­ing’ by Seth Godin and other media watch­ers. The new model — the one that is in play on the inter­net and other next-level fun like blogs and Sec­ond Life — is ‘per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing.’ See a pop-up ad on AOL that you like? Click on it. YOU have made the deci­sion to find out more, and con­se­quently, you’ve taken the ini­tia­tive to fol­low up on an ad, mak­ing you more likely to be invested in the pitch, whether it’s for a home equity loan, a non-profit dona­tion or a cam­paign con­tri­bu­tion. And those peo­ple that click through are much more likely than inter­rup­tion mar­ket­ing con­sumers to turn around and tell their friends.

    So what’s the take­away? You’ll see more adver­tise­ments and louder ones for a while. Spam won’t go away, because it’s the last and most des­per­ate attempt to hook peo­ple by way of inter­rup­tion mar­ket­ing. But you’ll also see increas­ing amounts of click-through ads that don’t just want to sell you some­thing, but want to enter­tain you, edu­cate you, inter­est you and make you feel like you’re part of a community.

    That is a lit­tle sad, in a way, because of course their main inter­est will still be to make you buy some­thing, even if it’s just a point of view. But at least it will mean that the ‘cre­atives’ of the mar­ket­ing world, who have been obsessed for 50 years with try­ing to find louder and louder ways to say, “HEY! LOOK OVER HERE!” will have to think of some­thing of gen­eral inter­est to say once peo­ple are looking.

    That’s the good part of it. The bad part of it, IMHO, is that it rein­forces and exag­ger­ates the kind of self-indulgence that adver­tis­ing breeds. Every­thing is about ME. MY per­mis­sion, MY choices, MY wan­ing atten­tion span. I clicked on a pop-up ad — thrill me, fas­ci­nate me, make me feel impor­tant. Though the New Mar­ket­ing crowd are swoon­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a gen­er­a­tion raised on per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing, I won­der about the effect on a soci­ety that was already dan­ger­ously self-absorbed.

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    … and the economy

    The big roller coaster ride of the stock mar­ket is all we can talk about right now, of course. Will it? Won’t it? Will it crash? Will it rebound? Will we go into a reces­sion? Will we bounce back into the same-ol’ bor­ing pros­per­ity that is all we’ve ever known?

    The answers change hourly, and they change with every dif­fer­ent voice you hear. Yes, no, absolutely, maybe, all of the above, none of the above.

    Don’t you get the impres­sion that all the usual infor­ma­tion gath­er­ers are of lit­tle help in this? We’re so com­pletely mate­ri­al­is­tic and cen­tered on our shared wealth, and yet we have no more real under­stand­ing or con­trol over our econ­omy than we do over the weather.

    I think it’s odd to hear at these times “The stock mar­ket rose x-number of points based on opti­mism over the bailout plan” or “The stock mar­ket fell x-number of points over fears based on the sale of Big­Bank.” It’s as if the entire stock mar­ket, which is based on the occa­sional behav­ior of mil­lions, were one per­son whose moti­va­tions we could know exactly. If Mr. Stock­mar­ket is feel­ing iffy about the bailout, why don’t we just buy him a nice lunch and cheer him up? If he’s perky over some recent tri­umphs, we don’t we buy him a piece of cake so the mood lasts?

    The more trou­bling thing to reflect upon is the real­ity of just who Mr. Stock­mar­ket really is. He’s actu­ally made up of … well, us, you know. Amer­i­cans who have been able to focus less and less, been less and less inter­ested in the next world (if they think there is such a thing) and more and more on this world. Amer­i­cans (and prob­a­bly Euro­peans and Asians, I would guess) who have been feel­ing more and more at odds with their fel­low man, less and less able to trust him, and who have less and less idea why they should do the right thing when they could do the expe­di­ent thing.

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    There are two other related points, but I see now I’m going to have to carry them over to a new entry.


    Related posts:

    1. Mus­lim cul­ture clash — what hap­pens now?
    2. “Pop cul­ture dis­cov­ers Jesus — once a year”
    3. Adver­tis­ing and the state of Art — part I
    4. Harry Pot­ter and the Splin­tery Broomstick
    5. The run­ning girl across the street

    October 4th, 2008 | Grace | No Comments |

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