The Cultural Control Gap

Let's step back in time 12 years.  It's the beginning of Web 2.0.  Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and other interactive webpages started coming into existence.  How old were you?  It's actually a really important question.  The older you were, the less likely it is you have since taken advantage of such sites.

That statement of course doesn't apply to everyone.  There are many older people who use Web 2.0, and there are many younger people who don't.  But I believe if you were under a certain age when the internet became more open, you are probably more open now.  We see it very commonly in society.  The younger generation shares more online than earlier generations.  It's because they grew up in a world where openness was prevalent.  Those who didn't grow up with the ability to share information so easily would probably be more wary of so much of their private life being broadcast in the public sphere.

This goes back to my tweethis.  Culture is reflected in and created by the technology we use.  Web 2.0 increased connectivity, participation, and openness, and the young people who grew up with it are so used to it, it's part of their way of thinking.  It has created their culture.  On the other hand, those who didn't grow up with this technology may shrink away from it, or try to exert more control.  They wish to protect themselves online, and they may put up more safeguards to prevent their information from being accessed.  The younger generation enjoys the openness and often doesn't see the danger in it.

In the end, we can have two extremes: those who share too much, and those who don't participate due to fear.  We also, of course, have those in the middle who have learned to connect while still sensibly controlling the amount of information shared.  This moderate middle is what we have to shoot for.  Our culture is rapidly becoming more and more open, and we need to participate in order to keep up with it.  However, if we don't keep a check on that openness, we will have problems down the line, personally and perhaps as a nation.  Control doesn't have to mean the absolute power of SOPA.  It's using your common sense about the information you share online.

Understanding Modernism

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, there was a literary/social movement that still influences our culture today.  This was the Modernist movement.  Modernists were all about re-assessing the way we look at the world. 

To fully understand Modernism, we need to know what came beforehand.  I already talked a great deal about the Victorian Era in an earlier post.  In the United States, Realism was the literary style of the latter part of the 19^th Century.  It tried to represent life truthfully.  Mark Twain wrote Regional Realism, in which he spelled words differently to get across a variety of accents from the South.  Realists tried to include many details into their stories, even ones that didn’t really matter in the plot.  Real life has details that don’t mean much, like the design on the rug, how many birds are in the sky, but they are there nonetheless and Realists wanted to include them in stories that were supposed to represent reality.  Many will say Realism is depressing because, in order to be truthful, many Realists felt not every story should be happy, since life isn’t always happy.

Modernism, on the other hand, sought to be even more real than Realism.  The latter had included physical details, but what about the unseen?  What goes on in the human mind is just as real, and perhaps even more so, than the physical world.  Although I disagree with much of Freud’s theories, psychology had a huge effect on Modernism and on literature today.  Writers like William Faulkner represented reality by getting inside the protagonist’s mind.  All five senses were written of, and thought process made its way into literature.  And that means thoughts the way we actually think them.  Thought is not linear or chronological.  One second we can be thinking about dinner and then we’ll remember something we have to do beforehand.  And different people think differently. 

Faulkner wrote a book my dad and I love called As I Lay Dying.  It’s about a family whose mother has just died and they are on their way to bury her body; however, it’s told completely in internal dialogue.  Each chapter is a different family member’s point of view.  Every now and then the characters speak to each other, but the rest of it is only what the character is thinking about.  The youngest son, Vardaman, tries to come to grips with his mother’s death by associating her with a dead fish.  One chapter of his internal dialogue has only one line, “My mother is a fish.”  We might think this Modernist book is a little confusing, but in actuality it is more realistic than many literary works that came before.

While trying to characterize life in a more realistic, psychological way, Modernists also accepted the fact that we can never really represent truth correctly.  A famous painting by a Surrealist/Post-Modern artist, René Magritte, shows a picture of a pipe and underneath in French it reads, “This is not a pipe.”  It’s true.  It is only a painting of one.  And moreover, the word “pipe” itself is just a bunch of letters, which are only scribbles on a page assigned certain values.  Who is to say that this object should be called a “pipe”?  Modernists are often ridiculed for being confusing and meaningless or doesn’t look like anything.  The point isn’t that it’s impressive or even that it looks just like the real thing.  The point is to make you think about the fact that everything we call reality is only how we perceive it.

Many of my friends dislike Modernism all the same, but I think, “If you enjoy contemporary literature, you have to at least appreciate the Modernists, because their influence is still rampant in our culture.”  We would not have the society or literature we have today if it weren’t for the Modernists.  Give me any book told in first-person or third-person omniscient, and I’ll tell you that the author is getting inside the human mind, which the Modernists did more than anyone, and therefore the author is relying on a tradition started by the Modernists.  You may not understand them, but you think just the way the Modernists did.

My Tweethis

As I reach mid-semester, it's time to figure out what my tweethis is for my blog.  Let's look at what each post's main idea has been.

How digitally civilized am I? -- I'm a little behind on the times.
The Renaissance -- Humanism and social networks are studies of who we are as people.
The 17th Century: A Power Struggle -- When there is change (in religion, government, crime, or technology), there is an assertion of control, which must be balanced with openness.
18th Century: The Enlightenment -- The spirit of freedom predominated in the 18th Century due to an open exchange of ideas.
The 19th Century -- The gap between the castes grew larger in this century, just as the digital divide continues to grow today.
20th Century: Change and Decay -- Humans adapted and flourished despite the ravages of one of the worst centuries of mankind.
Redbox: My Epic Journey -- Digital innovations might eventually do away with the need for cash.
Ode to Gutenberg -- Gutenberg's press changed civilization forever.
Open Access: I don't get it -- Open access would certainly increase production and discovery, but it may not be financially possible.
Why do we create? -- The internet increases our ability to create and share more than ever, though the difficulty of getting our work seen remains.
Occupy Wall Street and Peaceful Revolution -- The Occupy Wall Street movement is primarily internet-driven and is similar to the French Revolution in that it is decentralized and unorganized.
Marx's (and Engles') Communist Manifesto -- Marx's and Engles' dream of a class-less system isn't possible in our imperfect world.
Internet Memes: Who we are -- Internet memes have the potential to change society for the better.

I can see several themes running through my posts.  1) Culture is reflected in and created by the technology we use.  2) No matter what disruptive innovations come, humans will adapt.  3) Change is inevitable.  4) Technology is amoral, but the people using it can create moral or immoral products.
 
There are a few other themes, but those are the ones that I think of when I look at the posts as a whole.  I think I like the first one the most.  The Gutenberg press changed civilization forever because it made mass production of information possible, creating a culture of openness and participation.  Eventually this culture led to the production of Web 2.0 which further encourages that culture.  If Americans are lazy (we'll concede that they are for my purposes) is it caused by the many technological advances that allow us to do less and get more, or does our laziness cause us to create these advances so we can get more for less work?  Our culture is reflected in our social networks and internet memes (what we say and do online), but those social networks and internet memes also contribute to our culture (what we do because of the things we see online).

So that's my Tweethis.  Culture is reflected in and created by the technology we use.  I'm excited to keep going with it.