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

[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.