here is what I have so far, in case it doesn't save my draft.
(this is fun. I wonder if this will become an outlet for the questions and topics that plague me but are a little too off-beat for my normal conversations. alas, until I find my own Jon Caramanica / Joe Coscarelli.)
During my first day of grad school, my professor was situating us within the sites of popular cultural that we are “living in” by having us imagine all of our cultural contexts as the “waters” in which we, as metaphorical fish, swim.
Copy and pasted from her module, to help you get a better idea of what I mean:
So.....imagine our water IS our cultures of which popular culture and popular "texts" are constantly moving, still at times, pools, ruffle up as affected by winds and tides and storms...constantly we are reading, writing, interpreting, living in...but it is impossible for us to leave the water and step onto the shore to just observe....but, we try...that IS the challenge of this course and one you might want to take up with your students in your teaching, too.
So, as you see, part of the point here is that it is our immersion keeps us from being able to fully know or understand our proverbial water. (e.g., social histories like Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman are only ever written once a moment/era has concluded; our criticisms and commentaries of contemporary pop culture are never finalized until the moment has passed …and even then, most pop culture moments are still ever-evolving via legacy, reference, etc.)
But, when I think of Gen-Z – or, more precisely, this particular moment in social history at large – I think of how knowing we are. As the first fully digital native generation, the way we navigate our “water” is marked by our awareness that we are only a click or two away from any piece of information we might seek. 200 years ago, you would have had to physically enter a prison, or at least know someone who had, in order to have an idea of what it looked like inside of a jail cell. But for us? Forget photographs of Alcatraz or prison scenes in old Western movies – we stumbled upon episodes of Beyond Scared Straight on the TV before it could even be a question. We might as well have experienced it first-hand ourselves. The world outside of us has lost its mystique, because we have been given the impression that none of the world is really outside of our reach – it’s all right here, online.
Our knowingness goes wayyy beyond our immediate access to literal knowledge, though. Even more striking, I think, is our awareness of all the cultural “waters” that has come before our own. We know whose hair looks like Farrah Fawcett’s, we know what the socialites of the early aughts were wearing in their heyday, we know what bands were inspired by Kurt Cobain and who inspired Kurt Cobain. And in turn, we let all of it inform what we do and how we view what we do. Everything has a reference point, everything has been done before. Even the most fresh and original constructions of our culture will at minimum “remind us” of something from the past (e.g., lots of the chatter about Mk.gee’s guitar style is centered around how he is making the guitar “talk” in ways that seem totally never-done-before, and yet, something about his sound is vaguely, though persistently, familiar and nostalgic). It seems like we have been hard-wired to identity what everything is “giving.” At this point, we assume every song is produced in reference to a sample track. And as if that wasn’t enough, we are lore-obsessed. A lot of the time, backstory and context might as well be the whole story. I mean – coconut tree, hello. Even our generational sense of humor – distinctly ironic and satirical – is rooted in our knowingness. With seemingly every corner of culture promptly in stride with the 20 year trend rule, harkening back to the trends of both the 2000s and the 1980s, we usually even have an idea of what’s coming.
Does this not change the ways in which we relate to our “water” completely?
When thinking about the “water” we live in, I kept going back to this thought of how the water is being recycled through its own water cycle of trend —> passé —> inspiration/reference —> trend again, over and over.
What does all of this mean for the culture that Gen Z produces?
Does our position in the digital world not somehow change everything?
(i.e., what if we did just fall out of the coconut tree…? but also with an awareness of how we exist within the context of everything that has come before us?)
For the most part, it seems like you either have to throw in the towel of originality, or try reallllly hard to search for the gaps where something actually hasn’t been done before. (Not to say that death of old-school originality implies the death of creativity – there is a different sort of originality that comes from earnestly looking at what has inspired you and making something new out from that. It’s really more to say, was anything ever original in the first place?)