Electrons and Yellowstone National Park both struggle with a similar problem. By observation, the thing you wish to observe is changed.
I was struck while reading something in which a character considers traveling to several different cultures, to experience their unique characteristics. He was visiting localized cultures, physical land areas in which the people live in a certain way, with specific traditions and behaviors. This character also lives in a future of instantaneous travel from one point to another, across dozens of worlds – all of these cultures he visits exists in a framework where every other culture is easily available. We have a similar situation here and now in the real world. More and more, the artifacts, ideas, music and food of distant localities is available to us. Right here in Oregon, I can buy sushi, durian fruit, brie, Ethiopian coffee, and lichee flavored Chinese black tea. Immigrants have brought with them the flavors of their old world, and commerce takes care of the rest.
But what do we really have when we dig into that sushi? A recent report on Japan’s campaign to enforce the cultural authenticity of their cuisine worldwide was enlightening. A sushi chef of some 20 years experience explained what is most important in sushi. You guessed it – knifework. If your sushi chef hasn’t studied the intricacies of his knife for years, you are eating lousy sushi. Obviously we are missing some cultural context here – the sushi we love is divorced from not only the physical location of its origin, but the entire cultural framework which defines it in Japan.
We like sushi not because it is Japanese, not because of its cultural framework – we like it because it tastes good. The same can be said for traditional music from around the world – often deeply meaningful, spiritual and religious music, which we love because it sounds cool. In this way the collection of items that together make a culture are parceled out and sold separately to us, and we take what we like and leave the rest. The rest of the world does this too – they take our movies, our hamburgers, our cigarettes, and leave the tuna casserole, the evangelical religion and the car culture. Everyone picks and chooses, and cultures find themselves spread across the globe in a thin, diluted form – even at home, local culture is liberally mixed with products from elswhere. The act of exploring a different culture furthers this dilution, until we can’t really see what the original things looked like. Truth is, we could never have seen the original version, not coming from outside with layers of our own cultural artifacts and beliefs.
Yellowstone park is an incredibly popular place to visit. People want to see the wild, the virgin wilderness, but of course the thousands of visitors ever year changes the place. This is the dilemma of all parks and reserves, preserving them for the future means never visiting them, and visiting them means they are not really preserved. We’ve settled for a sort of middle ground of careful and managed usage. Some countries have attempted a similar middle ground for their culture – licensing the names of popular cheeses and wines so that only the authentic can bear the authentic name – perhaps it makes people feel better, and perhaps it makes economic sense, but its no real protection of culture against the ravenous and prolific world outside.
Something amazing comes out of all this though – chosen culture. I can choose to live in a way humans have not been able to until recently – I can choose my cuisine and spiritual belief and rituals and entertainment from a dozen cultures, creating a unique way of life composed of the most appealing parts of the rest of the world. Popular things, like pizza, rock and roll, sushi, yoga, all become much more widespread and are enjoyed by billions instead of thousands or millions. Unpopular things, genital mutilation, fermented mares milk, and bagpipes can fade away, hanging on for a little while in the localities they were born in, or they might hang on, enjoyed by a handful of people here, a handful there, across the world. Even the bad ideas never die out completely.
This situation, the ability to pick and choose from the entire world, creates an interesting situation for an artist, a writer, or a musician. No longer is an creator constrained by their hometown, they can find an audience from among the entire population of the internet-enabled world. Maybe only two or three dozen people can stand your work where you live, but two or three dozen people in thousands of places around the world adds up to an audience that can actually support a career. Niche no longer means small, it just means targeted.
An idea must struggle for audience to live, but even a tiny percentage is enough when you have the world listening. Vibrant communities grow up around the most obscure things online, and this is a good thing. Very little is lost of the cultures that are chopped up for individual consumption – just the framework and context which tied all the pieces together originally. If you like, you can call that the true culture, and mourn its death.
Online gamers and social-networking afficianados exemplify a new way of looking at culture and community. Online, you can choose your peer group, you can associate and play and worship and communicate in a cohesive community that has no physical locality, just as you can choose a lifestyle of music and art and cuisine from among the world’ best, just by going to the local import store. (Or, more and more, just the neighborhood Safeway).
So, can we say that our future culture may be defined in terms of audience? Elements of culture will live or die on their worldwide popularity, and your lifestyle will be based on what you choose, rather than what those around you do. The major cultures of the world will be the most popular collections of the most popular ideas and artifacts – the dominant culture will be the one with the biggest audience.
And what will any of these new “cultures” be, without the frameworks that held the original pieces together in their original context? New frameworks will be built, and their roots are growing right now. They all have one feature in common – you take what you like best from the whole of humanities massive catalog, and you leave the rest.
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