Tag Archives: culture

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I guess that’s really what funerals are all about though, aren’t they, appeasing the living more than the dead? We hold these ceremonies for people we loved and we talk about “what they would have wanted,” but at the end of the day it’s our own peace of mind we’re looking for. Death is so heinously incomprehensible that we living folk go to elaborate lengths to give our dearly departed a proper send-off, but I can’t help but feel we’d skip it all if only we knew what came next. After all, the person in the casket never finds out if their funeral doesn’t go well; they don’t hear the priest mispronounce their name, they don’t sit through the embarrassing cat talk — they’re way too busy being dead, whatever you imagine that entails (sweet oblivion, golfing with God, a new life as a llama at a petting zoo?)

It is this line of thinking which leads me to the final instruction for my funeral: no matter what happens, no matter how badly it goes, don’t sweat it too much. Life is so full of serious, so full of tribulation; death seems like a great opportunity to have a no-pressure gathering of friends and family. I won’t be around to judge how well it went, so just focus on having fun and being alive instead.

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– https://medium.com/editors-picks/557959730d02

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“The Twitter bio is a postmodern art form, an opportunity in 160 characters or fewer to cleverly synopsize one’s professional and personal accomplishments, along with a carefully edited non sequitur or two. It lets the famous and the anonymous, athletes and accountants, surreal Dadaists and suburban dads alike demonstrate that they are special snowflakes with Wes Anderson-worthy quirks.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/fashion/twitter-bios-and-what-they-really-say.html?ref=todayspaper

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In short, meta became shorthand for knowingness. It went beyond beyond. And it used to be fun. Meta could be used to mean something you knew wasn’t true but you believed in anyway. Or it could mean you weren’t quite sure if something was or wasn’t true — an ambiguity that was as playful as it was, well, metaphysical. Meta also raised profound artistic and philosophical questions about truth, reality and identity. But those meatier and rompier ventures into metahood (via Borges, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others) have been superseded by the endless depth and breadth of the Internet (meta on steroids) and the triumphal pervasiveness of social media.

We got to the point where we were so in on the joke that we already knew the punch line. Or rather, we knew, or thought we knew, every (possible) punch line. And it’s this knowingness, a knowingness not based in or on knowledge or experience but simply in the recognition of the artifice at hand, that has arguably numbed us to ourselves, to each other, to love, to freedom, to activism and agitation and protest, to the very act of creating something unironic or nonmeta. Paradoxically, the metadata that our government and our communications giants have been gathering is something this very cynicism of ours helped create.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/when-meta-met-data.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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“The versatility of the hipster signifier is what makes it such an empty avenue of exploration in goofy listicles and trend pieces while also engendering skeptics’ frustration with its dogged refusal to go away. Public approval of hipsters is at 16 percent, according to a recent poll—Congress looks good in comparison. As Kurutz notes, almost everything can be woven into the hipster fabric now; it’s a choose-your-own-ending story where every option leads to the same page, you standing there in some silly hat or other. White guy with a beard? Hipster. Black dude on a skateboard? Hipster. Just a sort-of-skinny cop? Hipster. Woman riding a bike? Hipster. You can play either a mandolin or a turntable and somehow still be a hipster. No rules! As a result, hipsters have become both an object of incessant scorn, but also endless fascination. When a hipster can be defined as anything, it also essentially means nothing—that’s an undeniably appealing paradox to poke at.”

– http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/09/proud_of_being_a_hipster_one_bearded_indie_rock_loving_contrarian_article.html

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Before the Internet, my parents were privy to most of my world. They saw whom I interacted with, where I was, what I was doing. Being preadolescent, I spent most of my time with them anyway. I had no desire to befriend four to eight strangers and talk to them daily, for hours, in passive secrecy from my parents.

After the Internet, my parents were privy to much less and would only rarely, and with decreasing frequency, ask about what they no longer knew. “What did you do on the Internet today?” was not a question I remember being asked. If my parents, squinting over my shoulder, saw Esperath Wraithling on the screen, they didn’t see the dark elf wizard I saw, they saw two meaningless words. If they looked at me — whether I was immersed in GemStone III, on a message board, or in a chat room — I appeared to be sitting in a chair, doing almost nothing.

Far from doing almost nothing, I was socializing in and exploring the metaphysical room that had been quietly connected to millions of houses. The shared, boundless room of the Internet seemed normal, even mundane, in the mid-1990s. I didn’t have another childhood for comparison. Only in retrospect — and increasingly, as my memory of a pre-Internet existence became tinier and more conspicuous, like something that glints — does it seem weird and mysterious, almost alien.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/when-i-moved-online.html?ref=todayspaper

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““Bro” once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men. “Bro” is convenient because describing a professional or social dynamic as “overly white, straight, and male” seems both too politically charged and too general; instead, “bro” conjures a particular type of dude who operates socially by excluding those who are different. And, crucially, a bro in isolation is barely a bro at all — he needs his peers to reinforce his beliefs and laugh at his jokes. That’s why the key to de-broing our culture just might be the straight white guys who aren’t bros.”

– http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/09/how-do-you-change-a-bro-dominated-culture.html

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