The “Patchwork Society”

  The myth of the phoenix tells us that once upon a time exited a might and beautiful bird that had brilliant scales, gold plumage and a melodious cry. This bird could live for almost 500 years. By the time of death, it would fly to a place and built a nest of aromatic boughs and spices, then the might bird would have sit on this nest and set fire into its own body, bursting itself in flames. But, unlike the other creatures, from the ashes of the old bird, a new phoenix would miraculously appears. We can use this image to explain cultures through time. 

 

  Many cultures have left their own burst of glory, and then burned down to be replaced by another culture, often even more impressive or important. That happened to the Egyptians that were replaced by the Greeks and these ones were replaced by the Romans. Each and every time, either the old culture would be totally assimilate by the new one, for instance like the Romans did with the Hellenic culture, or would be totally or partially destroyed like the Conquistadores did with the native american culture. Furthermore, this is not only true for totally different cultures, often we find this within one culture. The French Revolution brought a whole new paradigm first to its own culture, then after it spread around like wild fire through the Europe. The same thing happened later with England and the Industrial Revolution.

  Regardless if the causality was an external or internal event, the point is that no matter what, one culture should have been either assimilated or destroyed to give birth to a new culture. Just like the phoenix.

  This newly born culture, like a teenager, would denied its past and set its own North until another culture comes to restart the process. That happened in the late 50's when the moral codes were defied and destroyed by the new upcoming Rock and Roll generation giving birth to the 60's and the 70's moral liberation. Moreover, at the turning of the 19^th to the 20^th centuries the moral Victorian codes were replaced by the New Century more liberal ones. Once replaced, these old guidelines survived only inside the minds of the old generation, and by the death of those, they would be relegated to History.

  A breaking shift into this eternal phoenix's cycle was the large use of Internet and the spread of the modern capitalist globalized society.

  In the late 90's, when Internet started to be used more and more as a tool, we saw an increase in the exchange of cultural information. What could before take a lifetime, now was done within seconds. The easy access to information allows us to find any kind of information about anything we want instantaneously. Therefore, previously far cultures became neighbors and mutual cultural consumers, trading new social manners, points of view, musics, videos, fashion styles, a whole myriad of things that could reshaped the social behaviors. Adding the development and mass use of social networks as Facebook and Youtube, and we have the new millenium way of cultural construction.

  One can argue that Cinema and Television already play this role, but unlike Internet, this two forms of communication are not fast, easy and cheap to exchange in an Internet free environment. Movies and TV shows depend on intermediates to be diffused; while Internet acts in a direct user-to-user interface.

  In the capitalist globalized society, today's brands work to compete for worldwide markets. One of their weapons to do so is to create an easily distinguishing symbol. Something that characterize a particular product in every and each part of the globe. Therefore, we are able to eat the very same food, wear the very same clothes or even decorate our homes with the very same fourniture no matter if we live in New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo or Johannesburg. Another weapon used is to massify the consumer. It means we can find not only the same products everywhere, but we will find also the same consumers everywhere. People that have the same consume desires no matter if they are Americans, Brazilians, South Africans, Japanese or English. This is the convergence point where a mass capitalist society meets a fast media system in order to produce a hugh consuming eco-system.

  However, this eco-system is based in an everlasting search for novelties, in order to satisfy its appetite for consume. The problem is that it is hard to provide daily a brand new product. The solution to this particular problem is: the recycle of the old.

  Recycle the old is to take dated material from other generations and relook them into something new. This is easy to observe in fashion and music where constantly, designers and musicians seek for “inspiration” onto older stuff. We can't count how many times our parents clothes and old pairs of shoes passed from total kitsch to newest thing around in a blink of the eye. Or, when we heard countless “remixes” of our favorite songs played one after other at radio stations. One personal example is a sweater that belonged to my grand grand father and stayed for years into my father's closet and passed to my own closet without being used until last year, when this kind of sweaters were once again à la mode in Paris. So, I decide to take it out of its retirement and it was a fashion success. Sure it is a better solution then putting something new into the market, but the problem appears when instead of using something old again, we actually manufacture something new that resemble the old.

 

  People today live in a large cultural eco-system that try to shape them into homogeneous consumers. They will be connected with other people in the world and will realize that they are consuming the very own products, watching the same movies, listening to the same musics, giving them an impression of being part of this eco-system and making this an acceptable pattern. Also, the goodies they consume are the same, either because it is part of a large brand that has an distinguishing symbol or because it has been recycled from another previously existing product.

  The sum of all is a “Patchwork Society”. A global society built from small intercultural parts linked together by the power of the World Wide Web. Constantly using the same cultural products used, relooked and reused over and over again. Never before, we lived in a time where we can see in one day a défilé of transcendental cultural manners. In the 21th century we can find the high technology of the 00's, the financial and cultural extravaganzas of the 80's, the both sexual and drug liberties of the 60's & 70's, plus the moral rigidity of the beginning of the 20th century and the religious cruelty of the middle-age all together in the same time-space.

  There are two points of view that can be extracted: in one hand it can be a cruel society that destroys cultures in its way in order to homogenize them into only one globalized culture. But, in the other hand, if well used, it can be the rise of a free and open world society built by each and everyone of us. Which point of view do you chose?