Feb 7, 2010
POSTED BY Jay Babcock
As we’ve been saying, as others have been saying (see: Glenn Branca in NYTimes blog last November, ) — here’s the latest perceptive person — Douglas Coupland — to just go ahead and say it: culture is almost over. From today’s NYTimes Sunday Mag:
Q: How would you define the current cultural moment?
Douglas Coupland: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
Q: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
Coupland: They’re not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.
“Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation”
To me that sounds like a “great cultural macrotrend”; possibly the current form of popular culture.
Or am I missing the point?
Perhaps this is the ‘world boogie’ that Jim Dickinson was predicting would arrive by everyone playing each other’s music. All that rises must converge?
It’s hard to take a guy seriously who believes that A. disco “involved absolutely everyone in the culture.” and that B. Harry Potter and Avatar aren’t cultural megatrends.