So on a trip to NYC about a month ago I grabbed a copy of Wired magazine to read on the bus (it was that or People) and came across an interesting article by Patton Oswalt, “Wake up Geek Culture, Time to Die,” about the future of pop/geek culture. The first part of the article mainly discusses how in the 80’s if you wanted to be an obsessive geek about something you really had to work at it while now all it takes is a google search to become completely up to speed on whatever obscure tv show, music genre, anime, comic book, etc. you could want. I was mainly intrigued by the idea of ETEWAF- how we now live in a culture where practically Everything That Ever Was is Available Forever and how this situation is more likely to create consumers than artists.
Full article can be found here, the quotes below are shortened snippets: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_angrynerd_geekculture/all/1
“In Japan, the word otaku refers to people who have obsessive, minute interests—especially stuff like anime or videogames. It comes from a term for “someone else’s house”—otaku live in their own, enclosed worlds…
…The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop.
None of that’s necessary anymore. When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.
Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome (or, if not, just as immediately rebooted or recut as a hilarious YouTube or Funny or Die spoof), the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling. The Onion’s A.V. Club—essential and transcendent in so many ways—has a weekly feature called Gateways to Geekery, in which an entire artistic subculture—say, anime, H. P. Lovecraft, or the Marx Brothers—is mapped out so you can become otaku on it but avoid its more tedious aspects.
Here’s the danger: That creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The Matrix.
The coming decades—the 21st-century’s ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—have the potential to be one long, unbroken, recut spoof in which everything in Avatar farts while Keyboard Cat plays eerily in the background.
But I prefer to be optimistic. I choose hope. I see Etewaf as the Balrog, the helter-skelter, the A-pop-alypse that rains cleansing fire down onto the otaku landscape, burns away the chaff, and forces us to start over with only a few thin, near-meatless scraps on which to build.
In order to save pop culture future, we’ve got to make the present pop culture suck, at least for a little while.”
So I personally don’t have a particular fondness for the nostalgia of pop/geek culture but pop culture is a major force in society at large, and artists play a major role in the shaping of pop culture. I think it’s natural that with so much material readily available on the internet and with the plethora of affordable (read: torrentable) video editing software around, artists and non-artists alike are going to be working with found footage and pop culture media. I think we’re at a strange place in our culture, you can torrent video editing software online, rip videos from youtube, mash them up and put something new(ish) right back on youtube. In many ways the internet has replaced TV and people are creating and viewing their own and each other’s content, however it is interesting to see how much of this content is rehashed from pop culture to begin with, and how much of it is remixed remixes of remixes.
