Via the Anchoress, John Podhoretz opines that mainstream, mass pop culture is dead. That sounds right. He and the Anchoress both speculate on the reasons. I'd like to throw in mine:
People are now making their culture instead of consuming it. All these new devices and venues have been nothing but empowering, liberating. We're our own and one another's pundits and publishers, storytellers and networks. The audience has rebelled, risen up, and thrown off its chains of passivity. The inmates are running the asylum. And the resultant anarchy is creating a rich, deep layer of life, as fertile and self-organizing as soil.
Don't miss the comments over there.
Yeah, sometimes I miss the whole "Seinfeld around the water cooler" aspect of the culture, but we still have it, I suppose. Maybe that's why politics is so pop-culturally these days, it's organizing.
Anyway, missing some things about that kind of mainstream culture is not the same as, well, what am I trying to say?
Yes, it is liberating, and I'm impressed by the very real talents of so many out there in blog world....
Posted by: onparkstreet | May 31, 2009 at 09:53 PM