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 yourself:

A prediction: Music will (continue to) become more local, regional, less mass media. But by "local" I don't mean tied to a physical locale; by "regional" I don't mean a physical place. The locales will be mental. Due to the ever-increasing availability of cheap recording, cheap photo-copying, cheap communication, people will communicate easily with other people all over the country and all over the world. Without going through the mass media. People will cluster into cultural "regions" based not on physical proximity but on mutual attitudes, tastes, hobbies, beliefs, etc. It's already happening; indie-cassette-fanzine culture is one example; the Moral Majority, I think, may be another. I'm sure there will be more. THIS MENTAL REGIONALIZATION IS NOT NECESSARILY A GOOD THING. IT MIGHT BE HORRIBLE. A couple hundred years ago many people were tied to locales, only seeing people from the area, the nearest village. This could have been very constricting; one only got to deal with a small group of people, most of whom had the same religion, values, etc. Nonetheless, a person would have to deal, to some extent, with ALL the people in the locale. Now, one is likely to live very near people with whom one has little in common. But, thanks to modern communication technology, networking, all that shit, one can avoid dealing with these people. Especially once one has gotten out of high school. Or one can deal with them superficially day-to-day if one has to on the job but then go home to a supportive people-like-me communications network for "real" interaction. This may be the true meaning of indie-cassette-'zine culture. This is why I can't accept its self-justifications, its self-congratulation. Even though I'm part of it, perhaps need it.

[This paragraph was something of an elaboration on a more interesting passage I'd written the previous year for an aborted book on punk rock: "It is a social achievement that parents can't understand their kids' slang or that one child will become a punk and another a Mormon and a third will go into interior design (and discos and cocaine) and none will have much to say to the others. Each incomprehensibility is a kind of vengeance."]

Comments

[koganbot]

Question in regard to diction:

"despite almost every sentence of it being right"

or should I have written

"despite almost every sentence of its being right," making "its" the possessive?

diction?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

what's wrong with: "despite almost every sentence being right"? it's not as if the sentences you're referring to can sensibly belong to anything else...

"despite its every sentence being right" is workable, though the almost gets in the way of this formulation a bit)

"despite almost every sentence of its being right" means something ore like "in spite of every sentence that belongs to that aspect of it which is right" -- which is not meaningless, but surely a different thing

Re: diction?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in other words, "its being right" redirects the possessive from the sentences towards the rightness: "the sentences of its rightness" would be a slightly strange way of referring to all the sentences n it that were right, as opposed to "the sentences of its wrongness" and "the sentences of its who-knows-ness"

Re: diction?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

besides being strange, this second version would offer no implication what proportion of all its sentences "the sentences of its rightness" took up: almost all or almost none

An editor always helps

[koganbot]

Well, imagine we were discussing a person, we'd want to say "despite every sentence of his being right" rather than "despite every sentence of him being right," though of course that's not quite parallel. But yes you're right, we can and should get rid of the "of it" altogether; thank you; talking to an editor always helps, though we now are faced with the choice between, "Despite every sentence being right" and "despite every sentence's being right"! Compare, "despite his being right," which I'd generally prefer to "despite him being right," though I don't know why. I'm not clear on the principle, not sure what it is or how to apply it. Follett must have some opinion on the matter. (But probably you should get offline and stop thinking about such things. When is BSF due?)

Re: An editor always helps

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i imagine i will start getting anguished "where oh where is it?" squeaks in the next couple of days: i actually have -- for the first time in about three months -- nothing else due to anyone on any kind till the end of next week

"despite every sentence of his being right": is strictly speaking also ambiguous -- could mean "despite his every sentence being right" or "despite every sentence of the rightness that is his"; though i think the latter is odd enough idiomatically that we needn't worry... the former is better though: "despite his every sentence being right"

Re: An editor always helps

[koganbot]

Getting farther away from my example, let's say I'm writing, "Despite his being right in this instance, I still don't trust his judgment." I would definitely use "his" there rather than "him." So what's the principle that makes "Despite his being right in this instance, I still don't trust his judgment" much better than "Despite him being right in this instance, I still don't trust his judgment"?

(In "despite almost every sentence of his being right," the "his" is pointing backwards at "every sentence" but feels like it's trying to point forward; so as you say my sentence would be righter if it were "despite his every sentence being right," and I think this construction can handle an "almost": "Despite almost his every sentence being right.")

Re: An editor always helps

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

First para query: I think the principle is what the despite is best attached to -- which (in this case) is the rightness rather than him; "him being right" and "his being right" aren't particularly different contentwise but "despite him" feels like the phrase could end just there and thus of allows to you stop paying so much attention after "him", whereas "despite his" tells you there's more to come and what's more it's the important bit; so the sentence has more internal spring.

Second para query: "Despite almost his every sentence being right" is fine yes. I like it in fact. Again, internal spring: in this case because at first blush it seems a little weird, and then somehow unfolds itself properly.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"Despite" seems a bit wrong just attached to people

"Despite your sister, the party was nice" isn't ungrammatical I don't think, but "Despite your sister's behaviour [or presence or cooking or dress sense], the party was nice" seems a big improvement.

So that's what's at work here, to my ear.

[koganbot]

This all depends on how well the listener knows the sister in question.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I would say the "might be horrible" bit isn't received wisdom yet, though it's a strong strand of opinion.

My understanding of this bit of social history is very incomplete, btw, but the impression I get is that the hyper-locality of village life etc. is now seen as somewhat overrated: there was a lot more movement (of ideas as well as people) than historians assumed, though obviously none of it happened at the speed it could in the 20th and 21st cs.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

So why did you think regionalization might be horrible?

[koganbot]

This paragraph came after a number of passages where I was complaining about, among other things, the insularity and narrowness of my postpunk indie-alternative music and fanzine world.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

And is that the angle you think might be fundamentally wrong?

I feel like mental regionalization probably puts you in contact with more people who are unlike you. I mean, if I stood on a street corner in New York and said, "Everybody who's in their twenties, wears skinny jeans, goes out drinking on Saturdays, votes Democrat, works in media, and is interested in music, come here!" I would probably gather a pretty large crowd pretty quickly. (Well, assuming people were obedient.)

Meanwhile, if I managed to gather all the people I talk to online about Platinum Weird in one spot, and gave the same order, I would probably be the only one who fit the bill. As Dave said better than I did below, the different sections of our personalities don't necessarily overlap.

[koganbot]

Well, such insularity was and is real, and my musical subgroup(s) did seem to be evolving towards such insularity. E.g., while I couldn't imagine Thurston Moore saying in 1981, about any kind of music, "Oh, we don't listen to that kind of music," since, though I barely knew the man, I knew his world. But I could imagine lots of Sonic Youth fans circa 1987 saying it, or, if not saying it, doing it. And of course there's serious insularity and ignorance encasing a certain type of left or right political activist. And conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks will from time to time express his worry over the fact that he's seen geographical studies that show that in comparison to 50 years ago Democrats are likely to live where they're surrounded mainly by other Democrats, and Republicans will live surrounded by other Republicans, whereas in the past there was much less physical segregation in this regard. And dubdobdee said on one of my thread's yesterday that
"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 differered 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"

And what's on my and Dave's and Mark's and maybe Tom's mind, to some extent, is how people like K-Punk and some of his acquaintances are no more than an inch away from us (from Mark and Tom, anyway), yet they seem to live in an inaccessible dimension in which they believe and publish things about "popists" and "poptimists" that cannot possibly be true. Whereas ten years ago they probably wouldn't have had the numbers to have pulled off such self-insulating behavior.

So people can insulate, and can maintain certain ignorant ideas that they might not have been able to maintain as easily in times past. But overall, for the reasons you and Dave are giving, the connectivity and diversity/fragmentation make it harder not easier to fend off knowledge of others.

(I think I'll post downthread yesterday's interchange with Mark.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

So what is the angle you think is fundamentally wrong? That's what I want to know.

[koganbot]

The assumption that's wrong is that people will inhabit such subgroups in a way that allows them to successfully fend off knowledge of what's going on with others outside their particular bubbles, that these interest bubbles can successfully avoid being penetrated by what's in other bubbles. What's wrong with my assumption is that, though a few people may be able to do this a lot, find people they can barricade themselves in with, overall this won't be possible for most people in regard to all interests and ideas. That's because people within a particular interest grouping are not going to be homogeneous in all their other interests and attitudes, and one's own interests and contacts are always multiple as well - these are the points you and Dave have been making. Also see what I say downthread about the significance of casual acquaintances. I might be able to keep this or that prejudice or area of ignorance forever - obstinacy can be quite impressive, and isolation quite enticing - but I won't keep the whole world at bay. (E.g., at King Soopers and Safeway I'm no longer able to avoid noticing the existence of Shape magazine.)

[koganbot]

Actually, this may make it clearer. Say I'm an atheist surrounded by believers, which irl I am; if I want, I can go online and find whole communities of atheists who tend to mock or dismiss believers, and I can carry what they say with me as a shield, firm in my atheism and in the idea that there's no need to or value in getting to know what people do with their faith. No, let's not make me such a bigot. Say that, given the opportunity, I would want to understand my real-life friend K's faith, and how she uses it. But this is not pressing in the way it might be if I didn't have my long-distance Web atheists telling me my atheism is fine. Whereas if I were the only one taking a position, thinking through that position and understanding the positions that counter it would be more urgent. But anyway, what if I discover, in my online atheist world, a bunch of Buddhists. Well, actually, I know a few Buddhists irl. I live in a city, has got an international airport and all. The ones who aren't Buddhists are doing fucking yoga. But let's say I lived east of here, way over by the Kansas border, but I'm online, and finding Buddhists amidst my atheists. In crossing a physical distance to find similarity, I found distance as well.

I think the point I'm making is that in a sense we almost all live in a cosmopolitan city now, wherever we live.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

The thing that really bugs me about academia might apply here; though I'm not sure how well it maps onto music/taste per se, it gets right to the heart of why K-Punk bugs me so much. The basic problem, to me, is that every different department--and even different divisions within departments--have different but totally fixed ideas about what's good and what's bad, the goals they're working towards and the normative assumptions they make, and these things utterly inform their scholarship but remain almost entirely unstated and unquestioned within it. In some ways this is understandable, related to convos I've had with Dave before about how it's sorta nice that you don't have to keep defending every single assumption when you want to talk about something. But the practical effect is that it totally walls off one field from another, because even if they're looking at the same thing, they're doing it for different reasons, and so their findings are incompatible. With K-Punk, and with critical theory in general, the underlying assumption is basically Marxism, which means that capitalism is bad and consumerism is bad and revolution is good and resistance is good. It's seemingly entirely interested in nailing down exactly How Things Are Bad, not How Things Work or How They Could Be Better or Maybe They're Not So Bad, Really. And so it just offers an endless series of confirmations of existing theories couched in language that makes it seem like existing theories are being questioned. But they're not, really. They're just romantically embracing another set of theories that are already out there in this hyper-referential way that's utterly impenetrable to the casual reader. It doesn't add anything to the conversation, it simply talks to itself about things it already agrees on. I feel like our conversations can be criticized for not contributing due to being about things no one cares about, but not because no one can understand it. Critical theory seems as uninterested in questioning its own basic, underlying biases and assumptions as a religious fundamentalist. It's extremely frustrating, and why I just ignore it now.

[koganbot]

Well, what I want to say on behalf of Marx and Trotsky, neither of whom I've read as much as I ought, is that this is not their doing. And what I would want to say on behalf of K-Punk, whom I've barely read at all, is that this may be K-Punk on a bad day, and for all I know he has many bad days, but it may not be K-Punk on all days.

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

As usual, I can't keep up with all the comments on all your recent threads, so maybe I'm missing the obvious here (would hardly be a first) but I don't see what's "fundamentally wrong" about what you wrote -- not the prediction itself but your negative characterization of it?

[koganbot]

Dave and Erika have added some posts above and below that say pretty well where my pessimism goes wrong, why the interest groupings aren't really locales you can hide out in, how, though you can fend off some people and issues, you won't have everyone wholesale fending off everyone else - the people you potentially would ensconce yourself with will bring a lot of the unexpected with them, and your own interests will take you to unexpected groupings. Downthread I suggest that we shouldn't underestimate what we get from weak friendships and casual encounters.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

It was fundamentally wrong because without that regionalization you never woulda met all these crazy people who comment on your LJ! Woo!

Anyway, I think to a great extent we still have to deal with those unlike us, not just in a professional or "official" context that can be cordoned off from the rest of our existence. Like, you still have hear music in the grocery store; you still might watch the news occasionally; you still might _______. And you can always seek out that opposition, or throw yourself into a conversation slightly out of your depth and learn to swim, but only if you're a somewhat adventurous person.

But then, if you aren't already a somewhat adventurous person, who's to say you'd really be all that willing to engage with people whom you disagreed with regardless of how much you "had" to do so? Just call 'em a witch, burn 'em, call it a day. (And even if we don't call for real witches, we often construct ones made of straw, which suggests a mass out there which we yearn to engage, even if we're too chickenshit to actually do the work. The impulse is still right there in the strawmen.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This also sort of assumes that different sections of our personal and public lives naturally overlap -- i.e. our music is our politics, our film taste is our food taste, our sneakers are our philosophies. And to some extent this is certainly true, but to just as important an extent it isn't true -- one issue with PBS as a Lonely Hearts network is that it limits what you can do with all of your leisure, all of your politics, all of the many facets of your life. But then you might still be an orthodontist as opposed to a choreographer, etc. etc. There are some mutual attitudes that simply don't mix in any meaningful way, and there are a ton of not necessarily mutually compatible (though not incompatible either) parts of our personality that we all carry around with us at any given time -- be it a love of Kuhn and a love of Aly and AJ, or a love of documentary film and a love of Grizzly Bear, or a love of Republican dogma and a love of alpaca farming. I think to some extent an attempt to bridge a few of these gaps may close mutual attitude gaps (right now I'd bet more educators than music critics I know would take what you say in your "classroom/hallway" discussions seriously), and to some extent it's a moot point. Why do I give a shit if the guy I talk stamp collection with is a right-wing nutjob, or a college radio station DJ?

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I think to a great extent we still have to deal with those unlike us, not just in a professional or "official" context that can be cordoned off from the rest of our existence. Like, you still have hear music in the grocery store; you still might watch the news occasionally; you still might _______.

Also, it's odd to assume that when people cluster into regions based on "mutual attitudes, tastes, hobbies, beliefs, etc.," they will cluster in such a way that they all share all of those things -- there's no reason why people with the same hobby would also hold the same beliefs or have the same tastes. I mean, we're all yammering on about music on the Internet, but we're not all yammering about the same music, and we're not all doing it for the same reasons. Even when you retire to your "supportive people-like-me network," you still have to encounter and deal with people who are unlike you.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I've always been pissed that S. Reynolds never really fought back on my terms during the Paris Wars because "what do I stand with if I stand with Paris?" is a question that deserves answering. Who actually listened to it, and how, and what did they think and feel about it? Who are these people with whom I seem to be identifying? (This is, again, why strawmen can be important, too -- I'm not convinced there IS a cogent audience for Paris, it's probably an incredibly diffuse and disparate one, but there's a perception of a "mass" of consumers who idolize her in a positive way. I argued at the time that "no one admits liking Paris Hilton without reservation," but I have no evidence for that, just as the haters had no evidence that anyone DID like her without reservation.)

[koganbot]

I like Paris Hilton's "Heartbeat" without reservation.

Well, it's possible that some Astrud Gilberto type could do it better, but the chance of Alexander, Steinberg, and Storch writing it for such a person or that person wanting or allowing it to be a Scott Storch production are pretty small.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was keen for a long time on the "it will be horrible" argument, and I'm starting to revise that, because it hasn't been horrible so far. But I'm not sure the threat of horribleness has receded entirely.

The mechanism of "I like X and you like X and then we get to explore everything else we like" works so long as the system is set up to encourage not discourage that exploration. Twitter works like that, USENET did back when it started, ILE and ILM did - but the initial split between ILE and ILM is an example of the counter-force: the exploration being discouraged because it's off-topic.

And definitely it seems to me some of web culture is pushing against the exploration, and sees the future in defining and refining comfort zones: whether the highly fragmented model of groups and fan pages that Facebook has, or the increasing use of algorithms for recommendations.

[koganbot]

I think that insularity ultimately loses, even if some individuals and groups can maintain their deep ignorance and isolation for a while. Threatening the insularity is the existence of weak links, casual friendships, minor acquaintances. My guess is that while the relationship to a casual acquaintance is not going to be one of deep understanding, such acquaintances will make it nearly impossible to avoid an acquaintance with - if not necessarily a great understanding of - a broad range of the culture. And my guess - or hope - is that enough understanding will seep through (someone will get his or her interest stirred by something distant) that insularity won't ultimately be able to maintain itself.

(There's a sociologist, Mark Granovetter, I've never read him, but he wrote a famous paper in 1973, "The strength of weak ties," that I'm guessing you heard of long before I did. A quick Google search doesn't get me the original article, but here's a follow-up he wrote a decade later that I think I'll bookmark.)

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.