Once in awhile I’ll come across a bit of text on the internet that just nails it. This is one of those bits:
Nails what, you ask? Well let me indulge in a couple of self-links for context’s sake:
- “Everything Came Through Punk” (Parts One, Two & Two-point-five)
- “Let’s Tear the Fucking House Apart”
So my point with those posts I think, was basically that the economics of broadcast media sort of put a damper on a lot of self-expression that might have otherwise taken place in the 20th century. All the singing and dancing and poetry and prose and playacting and rhetoric that had been intimately intertwined with most people’s day-to-day lives for centuries just got commoditized and outsourced to a large degree in the past 100 years, and much like financial capital during the same period, accumulated in the hands of a select few. In parallel with this, technology drastically decreased the amount of time that people needed to spend feeding and clothing themselves. These two trends dovetailed nicely (from certain perspectives) in that mass media was able to fill a gap in people’s lives that might otherwise have been occupied with wine, women, song and (gasp!) political unrest. Now I don’t know about you, but if I had to put a number on it, I’d probably rank things like this:
- Song
- Wine
- Women
- Political Unrest
- Mass Media
So I’m looking forward to the next 50 or so years. Here’s to governments overthrown, dancing in the streets and copyrights being violated.
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