Thursday, July 19, 2007
OMG! Victoria Beckham comes to America!! yawn.....and Andrew Keen wonders why people are turning away from mass culture? If this is what mass culture wants to give us--old retreadded, rehashed former celebrities--then is it any wonder why The Masses want to just entertain themselves? Seriously. Popular culture, since the '90's, has let The Masses down with so many remakes and resurrections that it's like being stuck in a surrealist time machine, with the Glorious Past eclipsing and supplanting any creativity that could bubble up in the present time. Popular culture isn't about the new and the creative--it's about feeding the machine. And if it can make a buck or two off the re-broadcasted skinny butt of Beckham and her hub, then that's what we get. Summer's just got more boring....
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2 comments:
I don't think the mass media want to give us this. I think they feel they have to to retain their readership / viewership.
I muttered about media fragmentation and celeb-focused things on my own blog, which you probably saw. The death of the mass media, I posit, would be bad. Unfortunately, in saving themselves, they may undermine the thing that makes them useful, the dissemination of knowledge. Instead they're forced to disseminate celeb information to stay "relevant" and keep people's attention.
got to agree with ya, Mike....
one of my further fears, which was in a post I deleted, had to do with news and video. This a.m., the New York Times removed AO Scott's review of Hairspray and replaced it with an insipid video about the Hairspray premiere in Newark. This was NOT what I wanted--and it got me to thinking about the future, and what if some young person was trying to look up Scott's review (to comapre the later Harspray with the Waters' Harispray) and could only find the video.
The thought that we might be losing scholarship and critical thinking in favor of disposable culture really, really bothers me.
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