The More They Remain The Same
Posted on August 7th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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I know David Brooks can’t really be serious when he says things like this, but this is at least the second grand pronouncement this week* and it’s getting out of hand:
But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed [bold mine-DL]. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.
No, human character did not change. One thing that has been consistent and recognizable throughout every stage of competing for status and gadget-collecting is the enduring human temptation to fall prey to the latest fad. I will agree that MySpace is rather like a leisure suit and will be regarded in a very short time to be as tacky and embarrassing as the latter has since come to be, and not just because more interesting social network tools are created, but because it will lose its allure once the novelty wears off. At the most it will simply become a commonplace thing, no more remarkable in ten or twenty years than CD players were in the late ’90s or DVRs are today.
The beauty of these silly fads today is that they pass so much more quickly than they once did, if only to be replaced by yet another fad. It’s like when I was growing up and my friends and I were so enamored of Linux partly because it was experimental, open-source and new, and within a decade it had become a standard for use in major corporate operations. One day, and it is not very far away, the iPhone will seem to us and our children to be as clunky as a rotary telephone seems now, and we will wonder what the fuss was about. The most reassuring thing about all of this is that none of this status competition of obtaining and using gadgets really matters, and by its very transitory nature it confirms for us that it doesn’t matter.
*The first pronouncement was “globosclerosis” (a.k.a., normality).
Filed under: culture, technology
4 Responses to “The More They Remain The Same”
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Great post.
The leisure suit looks atrocious (I wasn’t alive for it), but I sure wish big sideburns came back into style. The people in the photographs sure look like they were having a lot of fun…
I had to smile when I read that line — he’s referencing Virginia Woolf in her essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in which she makes a similarly “absurd” claim that, “On or about December, 1910, human character changed.” For her, it was the advent of Modernism (which she dated to the opening of a particular art exhibit in London, the name of which I can’t recall).
There are, to me, two possible reasons he’d toss that in there: Either, a) he’s throwing some sort of joke, or consolation, to those who (like me) still prefer our High Modernists to the bottom-of-the-line cell phones that we use (only grudgingly), or b) he’s making a comment about the paradigm shift in media/communication/elitism being just as profound as the paradigm shift in art was at the advent of Modernism. Of course, if it’s the latter, I don’t see why he can’t just come out and say it in the column, so I have my doubts.
But what I find most worrysome about it all is that there is no real concern expressed about “the means of transmission replac[ing] the content of culture” — that is, even the most obnoxiously pretentious poseur can accidentally learn something (important?) about life from a single work of Eliot, Pound, or Woolf, but I don’t see how the means itself can do anything comparable. Of course, my views on modernity are becoming worringly more cynical every day, so it’s probably not worth listening to me here. (In the interests of full disclosure, I also have decided that the iPhone is destroying the world, but I have yet to come up for a defense/justification of this claim.)
[…] Brooks, Larison, gadget fads Daniel Larison, spot-on, as always, commenting on David Brooks’ “Lord of the Memes”, from the 7 August edition of the New York Times I know David Brooks can’t really be serious when he says things like this, but this is at least the second grand pronouncement this week* and it’s getting out of hand: But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed [bold mine-DL]. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone. […]
I will agree that MySpace is rather like a leisure suit and will be regarded in a very short time to be as tacky and embarrassing as the latter has since come to be, and not just because more interesting social network tools are created, but because it will lose its allure once the novelty wears off.
I don’t agree with this at all. I don’t use MySpace to keep in touch with friends around the country, I use it to keep up with my favorite bands and to also discover new ones. The genius of MySpace is that it gives the ability to bands to upload their songs and let people listen to those songs for free. Bands can now do their own marketing and don’t have to rely on radio stations or worry if their label is going to push them at all. Heck, they don’t even have to spend money on creating a Website anymore. They just create a MySpace page for themselves.
For me, this is the usual scenario: the local alt weekly comes out and towards the back of the issue (just before the porn ads) you can see what band is playing at what club. In the past, I just went to a show based on how I liked the names of the bands or if one of my friends recommended them. Now, though, I can look up each band on MySpace and get a taste of what they sound like. If I like what I hear, I go to the show and perhaps buy a t-shirt or a CD if they have one. If they don’t have any of that yet, I’ll eventually get an announcement from the band’s MySpace page letting me know that there is now a CD and a shirt to buy. I can then go out to my local hipster record store and buy them.
I’ve also discovered many great punk and metal bands from places like the Middle East, Japan and South/Southeast Asia, among other locales. One of our local college radio stations has nights just for metal and punk, but you would never know that there are bands worth listening to outside of North America and Europe if you relied only on them. And again, MySpace is a great way to find out what the scene is like in other parts of the world.
Sure, eventually someone is going to write a better version of this for bands, but for now, MySpace is a really great way for bands to create a buzz about them. The best part, of course, is that they don’t have to rely on crappy radio stations, MTV or scuzzy record labels to create that buzz.
I know I sound like a shill for MySpace, but believe me, I’m not. I just think it’s a great way to keep with bands and to discover new ones.