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Personally I think the word “counterculture” should be retired, as we no longer live in monocultural societies. We no longer gather round any shared fireplace.
by jl6 4y ago
Personally I think the word “counterculture” should be retired, as we no longer live in monocultural societies. We no longer gather round any shared fireplace. For a counterculture to meaningfully exist, it has to be somehow discordant with a dominant narrative - but there is no dominant narrative any more. The west is not ruled by the left or the right or the church or the state. We are all fragmenting off into echo chambers and bubbles of culture, where we each take a slightly different slice of the cake. If anything, we are all the counterculture, and so the term’s meaning evaporates.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoThere have always been meaningful distinctions and divisions in society that radically shape how specific groups and individuals relate to and participate in it. The boundaries and dynamics change, have maybe changed faster in the last few generations than ever before, but the phenomenon isn't peculiar to our time.
- pessimizer 4y agoYet I suspect you look and think like your neighbors with a 90% probability.
- jl6 4y agoAre you agreeing with the bit I said about society fragmenting off into bubbles (of local similarity)?
- bluetomcat 4y agoYou are correct that society is fragmenting into groups based on diverse interests. However, there is an overarching political narrative among most of these groups. There are "easy", widespread and accepted opinions which do not challenge the "grand" social order.
- bilalnpe 4y agoThings like 1+1=2, water is wet, sky is blue?
- throwaway4aday 4y agoSpeaking of bubbles, it seems like you're in a pretty big one. To speak directly to your comment. The shared fireplace is now composed of streaming services, news, and social media with its heavily censored content. There is a very strong dominant narrative in society right now, in the US it is somewhat two pronged but those tines are joined at the handle. The Western leaders all subscribe to the same clubs and seem to do a pretty good job of agreeing on the policies they introduce. The bubbles you speak of are all created and driven by the same underlying forces that have shaped media since the early 20th century. If you want to start to pull off the blinders, read Propaganda by Bernays. He lays things out pretty clearly since he was arguing for the use of it to intelligently manage society. If you take each principal he gives and imagine how it would be applied to modern media and technology you'll see things with new eyes.
- dalyons 4y agoAnd what is that narrative? What are the two prongs?
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoI don't know if we can say that because YouTube censors some things that whatever it censors is counterculture. I guess pornography has been the ultra counterculture for a while now, or filming and streaming executions. But IDK, I don't consider just sexual material to be a culture. Maybe specific fetishes, like sexual enslavement fetishes?
- throwaway923663 4y agoObviously not everything they censor is counterculture. But a lot of counterculture is censored. Sexual acts are definitely culture. "Giving head" used to not be a part of mainstream culture and now it is. It is a part of our language, or media, and most people's private lives. Separately, the word "kink" is better than fetish in this context. Kink means not mainstream. Fetish means primarily psychological rather than primarily physical. I think that all kinky non-fetish things are bound to inevitably enter mainstream culture, it's just slow because of censorship.
- 4y ago
- htag 4y agoI think this is an ideal we are heading towards in comparison to ~1970 but we are far from there yet. There are a hundred TV channels where before there was less than 10. There are more newsfeeds, movies, tv, books, music than ever before, and we can get the impression that our choices in which part of the culture we engage with places us in our own chosen bubble. When surfing around, it becomes clear there are several narratives (or competing narratives on some topics) that are present throughout our culture. The truth is that most of the media consumed is either owned by one of a few corporations, or is heavily inspired by their work. Now we are dealing with a many head hydra.
- daveslash 4y agoI think you and the user you're replying to are both right. To expand upon that, for most of the 1900s, there was a dominant culture (as you pointed out, fewer than 10 channels). For there to be a "counter" culture, there must be a dominant culture. I would posit that in the current time, we have a wide variety of well established subcultures whereas for most of the 1900s we didn't. Today our subcultures can exist easily due to mass media, whereas for most of the 1900s they couldn't - the subcultures were more "underground" - underground in the sense that you really needed to be part of a community in person to be part of the subculture. The "counter culture" was a push back on the smotheringness of the monoculture. Now that the monoculture is not so smothering and the subcultures can breath, there's less pushback - there's less "counter".
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- sct202 4y agoThere is a big trend on this thread for people to declare themselves the counter culture like it is an aspiration to be so.