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I'm increasingly of the "old man yells at the clouds" opinion that all pop culture is the death of human potential. Pop culture is practically the death of culture. It erases the enduring wisdom and collective stories that were told for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and replaces them with increasingly intense novel hyperstimula, that people have little choice but to chase. In my own home, we've been trying to spend a lot less time watching TV or otherwise mindlessly consooming, and more time reading or practicing productive hobbies.
That said, in my choice of novel I'm right back to last year's (or maybe last century's) pop culture! Robert E Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, some Dostoevsky to pretend I'm being cultured. Comic adaptations of Moorcock's works, a giant Calvin & Hobbes complete collection, then some Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire to keep my brow from completely scraping the ground. Maybe that makes my entire complaint completely incoherent.
I'm finding myself repulses by the concept of a franchise. What began as annoyance at how the Star Wars and Star Trek of my youth were hollowed out and now seem to explicitly hate me, grew into a realization of what the fuck was I doing for decades hanging onto the serialized output of this nonsense? Free of the spell of jonsing for what happens next, it made me question all the investment I'd had in those fictional worlds and stories. Sometimes the best part of a story is that it ends. It's not like there is some sexually deranged sultan that will murder you if you don't continually leave him with a cliffhanger so he spares your life.
I saw a tweet, all caveats about taking a tweet seriously aside, about the looks of concern and horror this parent gets when others discover they are just trying to raise their kid like they were raised in the 90's. Which is to say, free range, outside, little to no internet, no tablets, etc. On the one hand, my old man brain goes "The 90's weren't so long ago", but then again, it was 30 years ago. It's akin to if my parents had tried to raise me like they were raised in the 60's. Which involved my dad's father beating the ever loving shit out of them, and everyone growing up hungry all the time. Still, the look of concern and horror we've occasionally received when people find out our 4 year old has never used a tablet makes us wonder if the world has been taken over by pod people.
Our society is deeply, deeply sick, and to go full old man, pop culture is the disease.
If it makes you feel any better, due to an unprecedented general decline in IQ and the attendant competency crisis, the old man complaining about people being dumber and society getting worse is looking less like a grump and more like a leader these days.
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Yeah learning about the pace at which TNG episodes were written and shot was a revelation to me, and it made me question why so much is invested in a show that was, as good as it was, clearly hobbled by not having time to really flesh out ideas and rework bad scripts, and was basically rushing all the way to its end.
Similarly, years ago I was listening to a Phil Ochs song about how terrible "liberals" are and it just hit me, why am I getting my political opinions from music? From rock to rap, why are the pop stars determining what I think over political scientists, essayists etc.
It's feels like even the most deep cuts of pop culture feel shallow as a puddle, it's like it's all expressionism, just surface level reactions to things, no humility, no ability to dig deeper, due to time constraints or just ignorance of the authors. And it almost feels like a psyop where we're told to just stay in the there, don't try to look up the past, it's all problematic and boring. Like they read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in High School just to intimidate and bore you so you stay away from that stuff for good.
I feel this in my bones, because I loathed school assigned reading. Except for one singular English class in 10th grade where we read Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, it was my most hated subject. Good god, I remember slogging through Mill on the Floss one year. It was quite possibly the most boring thing I was ever forced to read. And I remember when they added the diversity requirement to summer reading, where you had to read X many books from the standard list, and then X many books from the diversity list. Because god damnit, you will appreciate poorly written polemics.
I have a model (not, I think, original) of three ideal types:
(1) People interested in things. Their ideal book would be a hard sci-fi book that explains how the time machine/interstellar space craft actually works. I have known a few people who embody this almost perfectly and they are either about as autistic as you can be while still being functional OR successful salt-of-the-earth tradesmen.
(2) People interested in abstract ideas. I think that people who gravitate towards classic dystopian fiction, as well as Big Theory sci-fi like Dune or some of Asimov's work, tend to be this way, as well as mathematicians, philosophers, theologians, theoretical physicists etc.
(3) People interested in people. They like books about people. This is almost all books regarded as "classic" literature, as well as a lot of any genre of books, as well as a lot of entertainment in general.
My classic image of (3) is a high school English teacher, who are also at least partly responsible for putting many of type (1) and (2) people off reading fiction. Works like the Dune novels and Asimov's books/stories were literally banned as dissertation topics at my high school due to "insufficient literary merit"; I was just about able to convince them to let me write about Dostoevsky, but I was strongly encouraged to write about the characters rather than the ideas. I know another person who had the same experience with Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty Four, which were too respected to be banned as topics. You were supposed to write about Jane Austen, Shakespeare (as long as you focused on style and characters), George Elliott (or F. Scott Fitzgerald if you weren't bright) and the like: character-focused, with minimal action, and certainly no in-depth discussions of how a time machine worked.
I think ideas are very important, but I hope it’s not uncharitable to say that writing a 4,000 word essay on the physics of interstellar travel in a hard sci-fi novel, for a high schooler, is more suited to a science class than an English one, where literary analysis is going to involve discussions of word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, commentary on descriptions and so on. Of course it would be entirely possible to write great literary criticism of passages revolving around specific speculative technology in science fiction, but high school nerds are unlikely to be capable of it, and it will turn into a bad Reddit post full of bad math and numbers that combines the worst of both low quality STEM and literature papers, so one sympathizes with the English teachers.
Plus, geeky teenage boys are always going to be interested in science fiction; some would say the job of an English teacher is to help develop a wider interest in fiction that might also involve genres they wouldn’t otherwise read.
As you note, there are two separate things here:
(1) Focus on literary technique.
(2) The subject matter.
It's easier to use (2) as a way to lure otherwise uninterested students into talking about (1), IF you are more interested in (1), as English teachers tend to be. But there we agree.
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