The Culture Question

This article, and other things I've been reading and doing for classes, have really made me question what culture is. One part of the article was titled "Creative Destruction in the Cultural Industries." I felt really resentful toward that heading and the section it encompassed, even if it wasn't directly contrary to my views. According to the Internet God know as Google, culture is defined as "the arts and other manifestation of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively."

I feel like most people have a very narrow minded view of what culture is. I got pretty close to a good definition when, a few years ago, I was in a fine arts class and we started talking about, at some specific instance of time, high culture and low culture. This acknowledged that even the "lowly" things still had to be defined as culture. Most of the time, I think we refuse to acknowledge the low culture things as culture.

Some people lament that the internet and/or technology is causing us to lose our culture. Our culture is always whatever current "art AND OTHER MANIFESTATIONS OF HUMAN INTELLECTUAL ACHIEVEMENT" we experience and contribute to. So, haters, how then is the internet itself not culture. Not only is it culture, it allows us to experience different parts of culture.

What I did enjoy about this part of the article was that it didn't refuse to acknowledge the changes caused by the internet as destructive toward culture. Instead, the section shows how culture has rippled in the wake of the internet.

What does it mean to be cultured? You use to hear, back some time ago, about how so-and-so was so cultured. But if culture exists in every facet of our lives, how can we ever escape being cultured? Everything we do has something to do with some part of our culture. I think what those meddling mothers referred to is what I mentioned earlier. They were acknowledging someone's well versed-ness in high culture. The problem of high culture and low culture arises out of, I think, the class system. Plays were once considered low culture. Ballet was once considered low culture.

Through the course of human history, as observed though the texts we read, we can see that there is a constant pull to look back and think of the good old age. That golden age is never the one we're living in and almost always the one we left. Even one of our oldest English texts, Beowulf, follows this model. Currently, Donald Trump is running his campaign under the idea of wanting to "Make America Great Again." And lots of people agree with him that America is not as great as it used to be. Through the course of history, we have always unsettled by change.

Culture follows that model. The reason that plays and ballets were considered as low class was because they were new to the scene. The new was to be disdained. As the new slowly reverts inevitably toward the old, other forms of culture erupt and take the spotlight. We then cling to the old, referring to it as high class and battle against the new new.

One of the "problems" I see arising  in this time is a lot of change across a short space of time. This is a very rapid cultural shift the likes of which nobody has experienced before. The rising generation, instead of looking back, is looking forward, embracing changes. In class a few weeks ago, we mentioned how the biggest change in the recent decades is our reaction to change itself.

Just because a cultural shift is occurring doesn't make it evil. However, thousands of years of training have forced us into that thinking.

I read an article recently about some new thing they have that will radically improve the internet and get rid of servers. It's something call IPMS or such. I'm can't remember. These smart guys were talking about how more people need to embrace this technology to better improve the internet. I started thinking, isn't the future predicted to be an internet of apps? How will this tech be good in the long run if we abandon web pages altogether?

My favorite part of this article was early on when the thought was posed. "Technology change, inflected by economic incentives and regulatory constraint, guarantees that today's Internet will be as remote by 2025 as the Internet of 2000 seems today." I'm not sure when this article was published, but I do know that we need to better embrace and accept our new culture or we're all going to be really depressed as change keeps smacking us in the years to come.