Novelty, cultural currency, social networks and you

Admittedly, as a new poster, I used to feel like I was missing out on something every one else knew and was talking about (that new movie, CD, whatever). Since then, I've learned that it simply isn't possible to stay that current---unless you have 36 hours to utilise in your day.

So, I can definitely identify with Tico's point: that my own social life (such as it currently is) has less to do with physical shared interest in current culture, than in life experiences with others. But then, that's the idea: we each bring out something different in the other person.

Novelty has a curious way of moving from "right now" to "what the hell?" in nanoseconds. Therefore, tis better to decide whether that person/thing is worth giving more than a moment to. It has been interesting to discover/meet others that have generally similar tastes as me....but even better to see the person behind the bytes.

(This all made sense in my head;>)

To me its all a bit of a game.

I don't see what is 'wrong' in focusing on a mix of things. or maybe not staying in touch with anything. It doesn't mean that you've lost touch with life as well.

Certainly it doesn't mean that, but the sheer fact that you have so much information available to your fingertips can be somewhat overwhelming, at first. Until you decide for yourself how to deal with the situation.

Pop art is definitely better than art art for criticism (ie impressing girls). It often says more (though not as strongly), and because everyone has seen it, you can say more about it.

I've definitely read books/gone to movies/listened to music for research only. It's not like there's going to be a test.

We should have a thread that consists entirely of rephrasings of the previous question :)

I certainly feel an unhealthy need to stay on top of things in order to keep up with discussions, but in this case the subject and the object is ILX. It was nice to have something to talk to strangers at the FAP about. Er, including Nichole, who I haven't contacted since. Sorry.

That's a part of the answer: do you like pop cult = do you like having something to talk to strangers about = do you like strangers?

I'm here conflating 'pop' and 'new' like a mofo.

Finally yay Ned for the question!

I was just thinking earlier today about how my new-found investment with pop music (i.e., listening to Top 40 radio closely for the first time in 10 years) has opened up a new area of conversation with a 21 y/o black female co-worker, and how much I like that. (We were singing "Right Thurr" this morning.)

But I do sometimes wonder what the point is, of "keeping up." I have a couple of friends who are obsessive pop-culture maniacs: one has to hear every single record this year; the other has to see every single movie. Because, of course, they can't make their annual Top 10 list without being absolute completists. And I used to feel like I had to do this, too, until I realized that I preferred to be choosy and just latch onto things that struck my fancy,

Of course, I still read tons of record and movie and book reviews, because I have to know what's going on, and what's out there, regardless of how much I participate in it. And I don't know why I do this, except that it seems so, so important. Cause, like, art and culture is important and stuff.

The other day I was listening to R4's 'Thinking Allowed' (terrible name, I know) and they had 'Britain's first e-democracy professor' Steven Coleman on talking about his research. You may remember it hitting the news in June. He gathered two sets of people, one set of whom he termed 'Political Junkies' (PJs), who tended to watch a lot of heavyweight political programmes and have disdain for what they saw as trivial, dumbed down TV like Big Brother. The other set consisted of avid Big Brother fans who had little interest in politics (BBs).

Prof Coleman analysed their views towards TV and, interestingly, towards each other. Broadly speaking, the BBs tended to be a lot more respectful of PJs than vice versa. PJs viewed BBs as the great unwashed, and thought the idea that there could be any value in watching Big Brother quite absurd.

In ILX talk, I guess the PJs are fun-hating rockists. The reason they are so picked upon on these boards is that the forums for debate in the mainstream media are generally run by PJs, who tend to be ignorant of and unthinkingly patronising towards reality TV shows, modern pop music and everything else the BBs appreciate. If they are discussed, it is as that most rockist of concepts, a 'guilty pleasure'.

Part of the reason I like to keep up with pop culture is that I see these establishment PJs (mainly middle aged men) and I wonder what they were like when they were younger. I wonder how they got so smug and closed-minded and I wonder if they just turned off after a certain point, seeing pop culture as something one grows out of. And in some sense they are right - much pop music is addressed to the young. But an engagement with wider pop culture seems does seem to me to be an important qualification for understanding the world. I wish I could articulate the reasons why.

Yes, I can point to Big Brother and, like the BBs surveyed, give the specific things I get out of it beyond voyeurism, but there's a wider point that I am grasping at.

But, but, I did used to wonder when I would lose track of what was going on in music, both chart, indie, and everything else I was into. And now it has happened. Since I stopped reading the NME, listening to the chart show and pop radio generally, I have been dependent on recommendations and writing about things that catch my eye on the internet, and I do find that I have no knowledge of the artists everyone on ILX and even IRL talks about. My own friends of my age have gone the same way, with a few exceptions. And with many of them I am still seen as a music buff (which I guess I still am, just for older things). So I don't know why it matters, but it does niggle with me still.

So maybe I do draw a distinction between keeping up with pop music and keeping up with pop other things. Specifically TV. TV is special because it's more than just the latest flavour of art.

Ned, there is something peculiar about the way you consume music. With regard to the comment of mine you paraphrase above, realising with hindsight that too much listening to a type of music was maybe 'bad for us' makes sense to us because we bound our personalities up in the world those songs created. You always seem to just take a detached 'enjoy the bits that sounds good to me' approach, whereas for others, it's all about identity and picking the music that matches us. Not necessarily in a lame 'wow, I can really relate to Morrissey's lyrics' way. Gang colours for people who don't belong to gangs. The idea that rejecting the wrong things can be almost as important as picking the right things. Gaps in one's record collection being a matter of pride ("you don't understand anything if you like both the Cure and the Smiths" , "the second House of Love album - yeach. Just the Creation one and Babe Rainbow thanks".)

This is all rambling and doesn't say much.

but maybe that's just me.

Is it bcz if you engage with pop cult you can talk abt it to anyone and through this talk, it gives insights into the world that you wouldn't get otherwise?

Ah, but that is only if you don't learn to step back and take a break after a while. Over the weekend, tis why I don't post: A) I can't cause no connection at home; B) I can come back fresh, ready for another week/round.

The "overload" stopped bothering me ages ago....now that I qualify as an "old hand".

Oh? And where are my flowers?;>

(Seriously, dude, I tease you. Tis fine;>)

yeah, agreed abt that it would be bonkers to do it if you didn't like any of this stuff.

But i think of it as a by-product of engaging with some, if not all, of these 'hooks'.

Ok, in sum...

I have mentioned before that I tend to get annoyed with people who roll their eyes when I say I watch SEx in the City or some silly romantic comedy. Those people are dumb. EVeryone needs a mental break.

More later.

both the world and the people in it change but at diff rates.

Unless you are sucked into a vortex, course your insights/tastes will change: If you still like NSYNC at 50, for instance, summat's seriously wrong.

The idea that music is more readily available/accessible nowadays makes the choice (of what to hear) easier. If we all understood music in the same way, what the hell would we need a place like ILM for?

(ie a building that doesn't stand the test of time inside and out is not a good building by functional definition, but food which stands the test of time = WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN?)

[erm i half wrote this to post it absolutely first post but then the phone rang and i've been yakking for two hours or hwatever and now i'm gunna post it anyway even though i haven't read any other posts yet]

When I buy albums I buy stuff that I already know I want based on hearing samples of it. I tend to NOT buy the albums all of my friends own or that get played at clubs/on the radio a lot because WHY BOTHER, I hear it all the time without trying.

So in the one case my consumption of culture and relationship with it is very specifically tied in with my circle of friends and what they are doing/want to do.

In the other case, I consume specifically to my own taste and often actively avoid things that are enjoyed heavily by my friends - again, why bother? Recorded music is much more of a personal spectacle, and I've never hung out with very many people who listen to the same things I do - I don't suspect either of us care.

Tom, why is your general attitude to cheese so markedly at odds with your attitude towards pop music?

-- Nick (nickdastoo...), August 19th, 2001

In conclusion, let me state that I do NOT feel like I'm missing out on something in life just because I don't eat pizza, sushi, or whatever. Sure, it would be nice to have a bigger set of possible foods to choose from come dinnertime, but you know what? I have more options than your average vegan, so there.

In other words, not necessarily mass culture, but definitely culture. So why do we stop short of considering culinary art as art?

why do we assume that when we refer to (say) poetry or glass-making or _______ as "art" that the word really means exactly the same thing (or rather, that it doesn't take on different, mutually contradictory meanings in each case)

"stands the test of time" isn't a BAD QUALITY: it's just a quality that we needn't seek out in EVERYTHING WE VALUE

murder has stood the test of time better than, say, Deely-Boppers

I meant simply trying to keep tabs on a lot of things, including things outside yr immediate purview. your description works as well as any that I meant, jaymc

go figure.

Anything and everything, in the broadest possible way?

Actually, no, I was meaning more about what's socially relevant and why...

there's so much *competition* to be a charting single that i can't help but imagine each charting single has some sort of special qualities which landed it there.

also, uh, i like to dance to new and interesting beats and i like lyrics that make me laugh?

I used to oppose the 'test of time' stuff in a kind of angry passionate way because secretly I did care about that criterion - now I don't, even to the extent of 'will I still like this single in December'. BUT I'm enormously fond of polls, lists etc etc in a way maybe only somebody who used to take them seriously could be.

I don't have a huge interest in 'pop' or 'mass' culture per se, except inasmuch as I try and respect other people and the choices they make. So yeah I don't watch any films really, high- or low-brow. When I do see a film I enjoy it enormously no matter what it is, though. It's just there are nearly always 5 or 6 other things I'd want to do rather than go to the cinema.

The area where my attitudes are most in contrast isn't cheese and pop (there's economic reasons why mass-produced cheese is worse than mass-appeal music anyway), it's pop and sport, where my anti-rockist ideals completely crumble. I only got interested in sport - specifically football - a couple of years ago, very late compared to most people, and I don't have any team I particularly support. But I don't think "hooray this gives me a fresh perspective on football away from the rockist notions of supporting a team and knowing who the players are", I think "oh god I know nothing" and never say anything on the football threads though I read them all.

¡!¡!

Actually, it's a lot like Blount's desription of why people are posting to ILX at any given time: who is a awake, who is bored, etc.

In other areas of culture I probably like an equal mix of the old and the new, but I've never much felt the need to keep up.

When I was talking about watching fluff like SATC and such... Ok, so maybe I do deeply enjoy that stuff but I realize that it is not on the same sort of level as, say, at art film. And being somewhat of a PJ, I rationalize to myself and others why I would watch said fluff. Much like many people listen to pop music supposedly only on an ironic level. It's like they're too above the music to say that they just enjoy it for what it is. There has to be some sort of explanation. Maybe I'm just dumb and that's why I enjoy a good dumbing down! I dunno. But it still annoys me when people act like watching ANYTHING remotely un-intellectual is some sort of proof of being common.

I have been pretty immersed in pop culture post graduation. I'm back out in the 'real' world where people watch tv and listen to the radio. In college, I managed to sink down into the college radio station (literally, as it was in a basement) and surround myself with cds nobody had heard of pretty much outside of the college radio world. And I didn't have a tv. And the movie theaters in town sucked pretty much. So when I would go back home to Louisiana to visit my family, I would always feel a big need to catch up. I'd be excited to hear the latest R&B hits on the radio and my two younger sisters singing along and dancing. And I'd go see new movies with them. And I felt like, "oh, so this is what the kids like these days/ this is what is hip." Then I'd go back to school and lose myself in rare bootlegs again. But, like I said, I don't really feel that need any more. I guess because now I am apart of the new again.

I'm 37: most people I spend time with socially aren't that concerned with pop music (or probably music in general). Even if I am spending time with people ten years younger, in many cases they aren't all that interested in keeping up with the latest anything.

It would be useful to me socially if I saw more films and watched a little TV (and paid any attention to sports), but I can't be arsed, for the moment.

Much of my current social circle (even the virtual social circle of people I send e-mail to fairly regularly) revolves around Latin dancing anyway. Kind of specialized, I guess, but I meet enough people I like that way. Not that that's all these people talk about, of course. Knowing about TV and movies would still come in handy. Even among the people I see through Latin dancing, I am generally more up on what is going on now, musically, than they are. (Some of them are interested in that, some don't pay much attention to the music.)

(I know I said that I wasn't going to reply, but that was before I had iced coffee and arrived at work, and figured out a way to make this answer sufficiently boring.)

Not as many in comparison to previous years, though I should say this is in large part due to my move and an increase in rent which has reordered my budgetary limits. 2003 releases that I've bought that aren't rereleases...hm, not many, let's venture between 10 and 20 max, if that. But I have been downloading quite a lot through various means and so that's a skewed portrait; however, I haven't felt the need or desire yet to do much listening of any of it. There's a feeling of, "Well, I'll get to this when I do and when I feel like it."

N.'s 'gang colours' paragraph was indeed fascinating as a delineation of difference. I was trying to think if I ever did have a time where I was so specific or if you will tribal about music (or anything else) and concluded that if I was it was by default rather than by intent. Perhaps the closest time I ever came to some sort of specific identity was senior year of high school, where partly due to the long-standing crush I had on a classmate and her fascination with classic rock I started listening fairly exclusively to a (surprisingly broad-minded in retrospect, they were playing recent REM and Love and Rockets and more) local classic rock station. But at that time I was very bored with my local Top 40 outlets, MTV was a reasonable enough alternate to that and I hadn't really heard/thought much about alt. music (in American eighties terms) in general -- even though thanks to the hugely popular 91X in San Diego and the fact that just about all my classmates listened to it, it was all around me, I should note, a pattern which I think repeats itself in my life. And even then I was buying and listening to a lot of distinctly non-classic rock stuff and I certainly wasn't trying to look any different or act differently than I was before, or whatever -- my social circle, such as it was, remained the same, namely being on good terms with just about everyone.

Millar's note about how some areas of pop art he keeps up with precisely because of its social aspect for him is very interesting to me, again it's also something different from my experience. If I were talking about my local circle of friends -- a combination of folks like Stripey, the indefatigable Y and Guy, and so forth -- I would sense no pressure (internal or external) on this point and no surprise at things being missed (and more on Y and Guy in particular later).

Matos's general enthusiasm for trying the new is always I've felt sound advice...but from where I am right now also has a bit of a ring of, well, something, I can't quite put my finger on it. It's a very American sentiment, though, isn't it -- an Emersonian idea of sorts, that if consistency IS the hobgoblin of little minds then the corollary is that chances must be taken to avoid consistency. The idea of self-challenge seems especially in recent years to have become a rote concept in so many arenas, whether it's thinking 'outside the box' in Generic Business Meetings or extreme sporting or whatever. So it's strange to me, something I think is a good thing could also make me think more of negative connotations as well.

More in a second, I need to switch desks...

NA's note on what is the effort needed for keeping up is well taken, but I think there's a definite distinction to be drawn between ability and intent. Turning on the radio all the time, going out to the movies regularly etc. wouldn't be so much a forcing in my case as it is...well, the comparison, rightly or wrongly, which comes to mind is a bit of a Bartleby character, someone who would just 'prefer not to,' as opposed to an active resistance. A couple of years back Tico noted off-board that while I was more actively chasing down and listening to things surfacing up on mp3 and elsewhere he felt a bit spoiled for choice, lost in the supermarket was his exact song reference I think (the rockist ;-)). The situation is reversed now to a large but not exact degree -- I don't think we'd describe our respective situations as mirrors of where we were -- but I can say I feel a bit spoiled for choice and more accurately downright overwhelmed, and so have stepped back quite a bit. I talk about this more in other threads so I won't repeat myself fully here, but I don't think this has impacted the social end of my life in general.

Sarah's take on things, about immersing oneself in the real world, is very interesting...I don't know, I guess I just don't see the real world as being such a one to one equation of 'people listen to regular radio ergo I listen to regular radio,' etc. I can see why this is thought or makes sense, but there's something that still makes me scratch my head a bit, though I can't quite put it into words. Her note about how it's all 'wanting' to be a part of something is interesting because we were all born into a preexisting culture-via-new-media context that itself isn't all that old or automatically the 'real' thing. It makes me think partially of how the past hundred years plus have, after all, made all these evanescent things fixed, music and theater as translated into movies and so forth, created new connections of currency, and Jaymc's point about how the Internet is the latest step in that acceleration.

Final post for now in a bit, want to take care of a couple of things first.

Buying is one thing, but listening another, I think we'd agree.

i think the endless pursuit of pop culture trivia would more often make you anti-social than more socially connected. or maybe it's a way for less-socially inclined people to get around the 'people' part and still feel connected to others. ??

I also think some?/most? of the time, what becomes mass pop culture is based on economics and professional relationships more than some democratic system of people choosing what they like (hey, like politics!). Therefore valueing it and studying it as the gauge of the who 'the people' are seems kind of misleading.

Some vague thoughts in this direction are the above titled+linked piece on my blog (scroll down a bit past the Medicine review [though you can read that too if you want / are really bored]).

Anyway... this thread looks interesting, I think I shall read it at greater length now.

Film is a completely different animal, btw. I think I've only gone to see a movie a total of three times this year. Then again, this year was a rather unusual one for me, so maybe next year that will prove to be different. Then again, what I would normally watch wouldn't exactly be considered critically adored, though it WOULD be populist. (Example: You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, or any other romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, or both.)

M Matos also touched on something I feel I need to address:

Does it necessarily compromise you to play keep-up rather than devoting yourself to "what you love"?

You see, I have the opposite problem. I was complaining to someone on AIM last night that I felt like I'd wasted my time online because I'd devoted so much of it to following this one particular band I adore and concentrating most, if not all, my energies on that one focus. It shows, too. I find that whenever I want to search my memory bank for a quote, the only things I can think of are lyrics from this one particular band. I can relate gossipy bits concerning members of the band with too much ease, I feel. It just seems in general that I can only really go on about this one band, and I'm really disappointed in myself for having had such a parochial mind instead of taking full advantage of the Internet and actually finding out about OTHER things as well.

Sure, the time I spent concentrating on this one thing I adore even still was loads of fun. I would have never been able to talk to anyone offline about them, that's for damn sure, and I feel like I got a wealth of information about them by virtue of spending all those years on focusing on all those little bits of trivia. But then I look at this forum and I realize that I'd cheated myself for all those years on this ONE thing. Devoting myself to something I love/loved has led me nowhere and with nothing except for some careless memories and a head full of useless information about one thing and one thing alone. Now all I can do is just play "catch up" and hope to God that in several years' time I can get to where I know half as much about pop culture as most of the people around here.

has anyone here tried Mewe for social networking?