Friday, November 07, 2003

Is There a Common Culture ?


Over at Duane's blog there is some discussion about the ffects of tv on us folks. Comments I couldn't agree with more. But one of the comments got me started thinking about what sort of commonality we have to communicate with in our culture. I tend to feel slightly uncomfortable in a prologed conversation if I know my partners won't get references to Seinfeld or The Simpsons.

This, however, goes beyond television as well. I've been noticing for quite some time that there is no longer any common musical culture. Just try to find a radio station which doesn not try to appeal to a musical niche. I'm sure there must be exceptions, but I think you know what I'm talking about. I think the last musical group that everyone listened to was The Beatles. That's been a little while. Now the only songs you can count on a diverse group of people knowing are little stadium ditties (Who Let the Dogs Out?), or, guess what, old tv theme songs. Even the latter is getting hard now, since most theme songs these days don't even have words.

Don't even get me started on books. I'm embarrased to even bring up books in conversation with most people, because I get tired of the response, "well, it must be nice to have time to read, but I don't." In addition, I'm somewhat hampered by the fact that I tend to avoid best sellers on the principle that if it's a best seller, it must have a lowest common denominator appeal. We went to a little get together last weekend with some seemingly smart people we were just meeting for the first time, and they got into a fairly long discussion of the virtues of the various Michael Crichton books. I was conflicted, beacuse it's so rare for me to see new people actually discussing books, but on the other hand, I really can't imagine ever getting on a Crichton kick.

Also, I had the joy of watching Monty Python with the low attention span crowd, skipping around the DVD picking out the "funny" sketches, missing out on the running gags and themes from the episodes. Oh well.

No comments: