sure the raw data is archived with greater access. but our relationship to any part of it is surely much more trivial and shallow compared to, say, a south indian Karnatic flautist who began playing his instrument at the age of 4, trained and immersed in 1 particular tradition his entire life, discovering an infinite possibilities of nuance within it.
Are we living in a disposable culture?
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)Logan Sama
BestThereIsAtWhatIDo
Digital culture just means there's no hard copy to dispose of.
As mentioned upthread, I agree that disposable isn't the right term any more.
I propose the unimaginative: Network Culture.
Hello fellow brain cells in the human hive mind.
but that means something happens once and that's it. like Tibetan sand mandalas or Chinese smoke sculptures. which is not the same as listening to the first 3 tracks of a dancehall album and putting it away on a hard drive.
Dusty
Tone deaf
There was a something a while ago on the Beeb (it might have been the Culture Show) concerning musical subgenres and the effect the internet has had upon musical taste.
In the 'old days' before the internet opened up music purchasing (or stealing) the average consumers taste was limited by the traditional mediums of radio and the high street store. The high street store only stocked a certain level of popular music, at a certain cut-off point, most things weren't profitable to sell and so were only available to the die-hard underground through mailorder. All obvious really.
The explosion of MySpace, YouTube, P2P sharing and blogging may have created a disposable culture, but its also made sub cultures and sub genres of music much more widely available. The cut off point of profitability no longer matters, even your 'high street' stores of the net like Amazon have an amazing scope of music.
So your earlier concern about only popular music (the crap on daytime Radio 1?) being remembered will no longer be a real problem as more and more people find their own niches to listen to. Eventually everyone will be in their own little sub-groups of interest, with little mainstream left to speak of.
I was watching a program about the Old Grey Whistle Test last night, and it brought home just how small musical taste was in the 1970's - this single show on the BBC was one of the few access points for many kids to discover underground alternative music.
The digital revolution has been a good thing for the freedom to explore, as long as you are willing. Its cultural footprint is immeasurable.
In the 'old days' before the internet opened up music purchasing (or stealing) the average consumers taste was limited by the traditional mediums of radio and the high street store. The high street store only stocked a certain level of popular music, at a certain cut-off point, most things weren't profitable to sell and so were only available to the die-hard underground through mailorder. All obvious really.
The explosion of MySpace, YouTube, P2P sharing and blogging may have created a disposable culture, but its also made sub cultures and sub genres of music much more widely available. The cut off point of profitability no longer matters, even your 'high street' stores of the net like Amazon have an amazing scope of music.
So your earlier concern about only popular music (the crap on daytime Radio 1?) being remembered will no longer be a real problem as more and more people find their own niches to listen to. Eventually everyone will be in their own little sub-groups of interest, with little mainstream left to speak of.
I was watching a program about the Old Grey Whistle Test last night, and it brought home just how small musical taste was in the 1970's - this single show on the BBC was one of the few access points for many kids to discover underground alternative music.
The digital revolution has been a good thing for the freedom to explore, as long as you are willing. Its cultural footprint is immeasurable.
The Long Tail
which ties in nicely with that much touted adage of the long tail and how the modern era is allowing smaller and smaller niches to be accessed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
which ties in nicely with that much touted adage of the long tail and how the modern era is allowing smaller and smaller niches to be accessed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
Yes the long tail is important. It is one aspect of a broadband media era, in comparison to a previous narrowband one (as highlighted by the only outlet for "alternative" music in the late 70s being the old grey whistle test and the john peel show...). All these things lock into the emerging paradox of continual ephemeral entertainment flow crossed with permanently accessible archives, dispersed via networks. Its the mechanics of pure post-modernism perhaps, a time out of time, the breaking down of the single central canonical narrative into a thread of multifarious interwoven paths, incredibly self-aware of its (Culture's, I mean) importance, and yet paradoxically in that very self-awareness doomed to irrelevance perhaps? Endlessly historicised to the point where nothing surprising can happen at all...
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