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 19th to the 20th 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?
