Saved by kev and
Is There a Crisis of Seriousness?
I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this, I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Sometimes, things are serious. Not everything needs to be turned into a joke. As Anhedönia said, we can still make jokes and laugh, but we’ve lost the ability to know when to stop – and it’s time we learned how.
Halima Jibril • Ethel Cain says we are in an irony epidemic – is she right?
Sterling Proffer and added
In a casual aside, Duke sociologist Keiran Healy offered a simple but terrifying observation.*
Culture has changed fundamentally.
It used to be the ballast of our world.
Now it creates chaos.
Culture has changed fundamentally.
It used to be the ballast of our world.
Now it creates chaos.
What if culture is the problem?
alexi gunner added
The whole aesthetic economy is being rapidly altered, and what will replace it? Aside from glib tailored entertainments—that is, works that placate the surface itch without making us confront the deeper needs and purposes. This is an enormously important question: Can we live without addressing those?
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Rather than prestige, this cultural moment is dominated by metrics, as George S. Trow predicted in a 1980 New Yorker essay called “Within the context of no context”:
“That movement... from wonder that a country should be so big, to the wonder that a building could be so big, to the last, small wonder, that a marketplace could be so big—that was the... See more
The prestige recession
Alex Dobrenko added
😢
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.