People will cluster into cultural "regions" based not on physical proximity but on mutual attitudes

[koganbot]

At the very end of my Why Music Sucks broadside of February 1987 I wrote a paragraph that in retrospect might seem supernaturally prophetic. Whereas now, such a paragraph, with a few of the words changed, would be the common, received wisdom. However, despite almost every sentence of it being right, I think it's fundamentally wrong. But see for

Comments

Pieces parts

[koganbot]

Pasting in a conversation I had yesterday with Mark over on this thread:

dubdobdee
still under the gun...
2009-08-23 03:55 am (local) Select:
... back at bsf

but just to say that bsf is (in some ways) about exactly this topic: how d'you create the room everyone wants (now and then) to be in with everyone else

isn't the bottom-line what you said about meltzer and rorty: if only you had a gun, you could force them into a room and not let them leave till they understood each other

with magazines and newspapers in the 80s, there was still the ghost of a gun -- if you weren't present in those pages (in that room), you were nowhere

but fanzine culture created a whole bunch of other pages you could be on instead: you no longer had to force yourself to stay in the presence of people you differed with, or find a mode of tolerance or things you agreed on

on the internet, there is nothing to keep you anywhere close to or patient with the arguments of your foes: nothing to enforce even minimal stabs at understanding

what's the gun? it can't be hostile force, it's too easy to flee -- it HAS to be elective attraction (haha the power of love)

dubdobdee
KRS had the right idea
2009-08-23 03:57 am (local) Select:
patient, both sense: same latin root as passion and passive

koganbot
Re: KRS had the right idea
2009-08-23 07:31 am (local) Select:
"on the internet, there is nothing to keep you anywhere close to or patient with the arguments of your foes: nothing to enforce even minimal stabs at understanding"

Ah, here's a point where I'm more optimistic than you:

What's happening is that we're far more cosmopolitan and connected than we were fifty-five years ago (let's take the release of Elvis's "That's Alright Mama" as our comparison date, which happens to be the year I was born), so if we choose someone else taken at random, anywhere in the world, we're more likely to know what's up with him and he's more likely to know the same about us. But paradoxically we experience this as greater fragmentation because (1) we've broken up into more "pieces" (i.e., short-term subgroupings), and (2) we are more - not less - in touch with more of the pieces, so (3) we are less - not more - likely to think that someone is either with us or off the radar. But since (4) I and you are more rather than less likely to be pulled by distant and different pieces than we formerly were, (5) you and I might experience this as our becoming more different from each other, hence there seems to be more division and less understanding, when in actuality (6) this pulling away makes us each more in range with a larger world, despite the feeling that we are less connected with each other.

So what I'm saying is that we perceive more social "pieces" now than we did in the past, both through internal "fragmenting" and greater awareness of distant pieces, but that we're less not more able to avoid knowing something of what's going in in some other piece. So even if, say, you become less close to or able to understand Simon Reynolds, and vice versa, nonetheless, through Simon, you are more likely to be closer to and partially understand someone distant who you'd have known zilch about otherwise. And vice versa.

Barring wholesale economic and ecological collapse (which unfortunately isn't out of the question), I see this process as inevitable. Again, it might feel like fragmentation and estrangement, but the actual movement will be towards greater connection to and understanding of the world.

koganbot
Re: KRS had the right idea
2009-08-23 07:53 am (local) Select:
My guess is that the U.S. radical right, Al-Qaeda, and the like are attempts both to use this connectivity (which helps them to expand their membership) and to fend off the understanding that comes with the connectivity. Of course, I know little about them, so I'm talking out my ass.