Remember when contemporary creative works provoked deeper cultural reactions than a smattering of emoji?
A significant number of readers can probably recall a time when substantial creative works actually played a role in shaping broader cultural conversations. A casual perusal of important books from the 1980s immediately recalls the many ways their contents suffused American life, even among those who haven’t read them. Consider this short list:
I’m conscious of how influential creative expressions from previous eras delivered their cultural payloads through different media mechanisms than they do today. (We can leave that examination for another day.) I’m also focusing on the 1980s precisely because the media landscape in that decade describes global cultures avant les déluge. Anyone remember just how much cultural muscle the magazine market exerted with weekly articles and photo-spreads? Make a sandwich, open a magazine, read something with lunch: ordinary behavior in 1980. The implications of that behavior, however, extend far beyond simply consuming content in non-electronic formats. A culture capable of even casually reading anything — car magazines, gossip magazines, music magazines, newspapers— meant its citizens were capable of simply focusing on something—anything—for more than a fleeting moment, by which I mean minutes not seconds. Hold that thought (if you can focus for more than a fleeting moment), ‘cause I’ll be back to it shortly.
In the 1980s, things began to change. No single factor provoked this, although multiple contemporaneous forces converged, as is often the historical norm during moment of profound change. (For your consideration: the end of The Cold War; satellite communications; personal computers) Pop music encountered, for better or worse, the second British Invasion, amplified by the era’s biggest meme machine, MTV. Hollywood, for better or worse, began to get its hands around the idea of tentpole properties—think Back to the Future and Indiana Jones— rather than “major motion pictures” from the previous decade —think Apocalypse Now and Chinatown. CNN inaugurated the first 24-hour news cycle in any medium. Nobody watched it very much in the beginning, but the awareness that such a thing existed at all—24 hours of news every day!—rapidly changed expectations about how often anyone might need or want updated information about anything.
I started this essay focusing on books for a reason. Books, I believe, often amount to leading cultural indicators of deep cultural changes, as well as simultaneous mechanisms for making sense of where we’ve already been. The list at the top suggests both. In just five titles, we see windsocks about identity politics, technological inseparability from all aspects of modern life, and existential examinations placed in the cultural foreground. Even among the many people who did not read these titles, these books and a small pile of others profoundly changed the cultural conversation. They were influencers. If you have any doubt about their profound influence [sic], consider:
The Color Purple has recently been turned into a movie for the second time, and continues to function as a vital engine for cultural dialogue
Apple released what might arguably be the first mainstream mirrorshades
Western tensions with wide portions of the Islamic world have not abated
Wealth disparities have expanded and become more visible and more divisive
Scientific and technical conversations have become a daily part of ordinary life, including extraordinary telescopes designed to rewrite our understanding of our own cosmic origin story
Change accelerated in the 1990s. Clearly there were other titles of profound influence: Infinite Jest prognostically anticipated the ubiquitously commercialized future. The Things They Carried looked backwards—and prognostically forwards—at the timeless experiences of soldiers at war. But one event on August 6, 1991 shredded everything. You’re reading this essay on the outgassed exhalations of that initial moment of ignition. That day, the World Wide Web appeared with its first publicly facing page, offering the potential for a million monkeys to write neo-Shakespearean verse.
The expression “fast forward” ironically recalls an analogue world of magnetic tape spinning on spindles. Now it’s a cute anachronism. Therefore, fast forward to today and recall my earlier charge to consider minutes not seconds. Today’s influencers provoke us to engage with information at the metaphorically atomic scale. Largely gone from the day-to-day national dialogue are long-form magazine articles. It’s true that long form essays still appear online and in the quaint printed pages of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Sunday New York Times, and a handful of others. But those print pages are essentially dead sheafs of tree pulp (sad), and their online versions do not have the same cultural influence they may have had in decades past. They may be sharable, and thus easier to share (I mean, obviously), but I do not believe that broader cultural dialogue hangs on modern “sharables” in the same ways that millions of people used to wait for the latest cover stories in Time or Newsweek.
Airport lounges present fewer book covers facing opposing chairs than ever before, replaced with the anodyne backs of cell phones held by slack jawed travelers lost in endless scrolls. Movies themselves have been relegated to last-option slouch sessions on couches, often broken up by refrigerator raids and distracting images on second screens competing for attention. Music these days is…strange. Songs appear in endless streams and playlists, separated from albums, floating adjacent to the artists themselves. To paraphrase a song in the Wizard of Oz, “Click-click here, click-click there, and a couple of tra-la-las…that’s how we move our thumbs all day….!”
What’s constant, as usual, is change. Nobody gets wildly excited about tulip bulbs anymore, but clearly people still get excited about all sorts of other stuff. Excitement does not equate to influence, however. What captures my attention and makes me worry is that the influence invested by simply the constant pursuit of stimulation has largely supplanted any actual influence from creative work. Influencers have become their own source material, rather than the source material influencing new creators. There are no longer movies in common cultural conversation, no novels that everyone can cite, precious few collective moments that remind us we’re not alone. As if to amplify this point, it’s worth noting that the trend continues to accelerate. As culture becomes more and more self-cannabalizing, we’re just about to usher in artificial intelligence to supercharge the recursive process. Soon even our own sharables will become synthetic creations of soulless systems.
In other words, après vous, le déluge.