Culture is a big issue for me. I started my degree in Communication at SFU doing cultural studies classes (what I affectionately refer to as the 20 series) but that tended to focus on the wonderfully homogenizing, simplifying and somewhat naive world of popular culture. As the years have passed, I’ve stated swivelling my head a little more to look at the unbelievable amount of culture that lives and thrives beyond the screen of the television and even beyond all-engaging screen of the computer monitor; and I’m going to make an attempt to unpack some of these worlds before I forget them at my next CMNSU meeting. Damn attention span.
Internet subcultures: These remind me of some of the malls in Hong Kong–covered with mirrored surfaces, strobe lights, rows and rows of alarm clocks all going off with their counterfeit Japanese-cuddly character faces, the roar of omnipresent milling crowds, and that thought: there’s something here you want, you just don’t know what it is yet. Shut up and pay attention to find out. Internet subcultures are like that for me. Livejournal, Flickr, BoingBoing, WorldChanging, 43places/things/AllConsuming–there’s something about the sites that reach out beyond each of their contexts, though they are all reaching, scraping their hands on the way to some common connection that could really last, be it, be wonderful, if only we could have the attention span to sustain them.
Academic culture: Everybody wants to do something. Now go put what you want to do in words. Maybe if you’re lucky and play it right someone will give you money to do what you want to do, and maybe if you’re really lucky you can find people that want to do precisely what it is you think would world too. Oh, and make sure they’re not neo-Nazis too. Or cheering for the Singularity.
Immigrants: The constant yet unarticulated drive to make it, do it, be it. Why has this phrase living the dream all of a sudden come into fashion? I must have missed the memo, because I would prefer to live my dream than any dream that is assumed to be universal with the ‘the’ article. At base, there’s also the idea that we’re going to take the best of your methods and do it better than you ever did, because we were able to see where you screwed it up. Especially if we believe in it harder than you do. Don’t mind our brethren coasting on their parents’ money looking for emptiness in all the wrong places. We’ll take care of them too.
Tech culture: Sure, it takes a lot of time to learn, stubborn determination, aptitude that most of us are willing to leave out. I refer to myself as a power end-user because I don’t want to be a developer, but I do want to use things well and to make sure things are usable. I was helping my mom swap her handset with Telus the other day. Horrific, traumatic experience, and I applaud my mother for having much more tolerance for their screwiness than I’ve been able to find in myself. Tech will change the world, we tell ourselves. We believe it and then we change the world. We give our tech too much credit. I’m semi-convinced that only people that don’t believe themselves would give the technology all the credit.
The screw-the-lines contingent: I don’t have my all-consuming code in yet, but right now I’m reading one or two sections of Rudy Rucker’s The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul every night before I fall asleep. And I love the book and what it says so much that I leave the book (it’s slightly larger and thicker than the average volume of an encylopedia) in my bed and practically hug it to sleep. Because I swear, I had one teacher that convinced me that being good at just-math or just-science or just-English or just-Art was all a bunch of hogwash, and nothing I’ve done since would’ve happened if it weren’t for this one idea. And Rucker’s book is challenging–I haven’t read so much about quantum mechanics since I left AP Physics in high school–but being able to do this stuff for fun is nothing short of unbelievable. And to see that there are others that do this, and enjoy it, and care…it’s enough to make me want to wax poetry on giving back to the world that has let me enjoy it so. (I’ll save that for my livejournal.)
This entry makes a whole lot more sense if one knows that I’m currently doing a project on cross-cultural dialogue. And crossing these cultures, to me, is just as vital, important and worth an endeavour as appreciating mozza ball soup and eating wasabi green beans and edamame and mmmm, I want Japanese all you can eat now…
