By Marc Jampole
As we have seen, the elements of our cultural
vocabulary come from many sources—works of high, low and commercial art and
entertainment, news events, history as taught in elementary school, scientific
discoveries, ethnic groups and other subcultures (such as urban Afro-American
culture, college students or tattoo wearers) and other countries. From a
bubbling cauldron of new and recycled cultural artifacts constantly emerge pieces
of shared language that penetrate the consciousness of virtually all members of
a society.
But while the bits of our shared cultural language
can come from anywhere, the main mechanisms for sifting and shaping the
cultural vocabulary have always remained firmly in the hands of ruling elites because
of their control of the channels of distribution and dispersion of information
and knowledge. During medieval times, for example, the church decided which of
the thousands of Greek and Roman manuscripts monks would study and therefore
copy and save. A political deal with a Roman emperor led to the widespread
influence of Christianity on the cultural vocabulary of the West and the
disappearance of the many rites and deities of Roman religious practice.
Royalty of all kinds from kings to emperors to Rajas have promoted and
suppressed literature and visual arts. Until well into the 18th century, the
writers and artists who repeated and amplified myths and legends were either
part of or supported by the ruling elite. Church and government have controlled
education in most cultures.
The development of the printing press and
capitalism transformed the ownership of communications vehicles, as commercial
enterprises joined religions, aristocracy and government as the sieve that
sorts our cultural ephemera to determine which will remain part of our
vocabulary and which will disappear.
Society’s wealthiest tend to own most commercial media, from newspapers to
large websites, which means that the owners of the prime commercial means of
transmitting cultural artifacts all come from the same social class and tend to
have the same basic values and interests. In undemocratic societies, the
commercial media tends to ally with the government. In a democratic society,
the commercial media tends to be owned by those who have greatest access and
control of the government.
It was, for example, a combination of public
schools, text book publishers, movie producers, popular novelists,
politically-motivated historians and politicians who promulgated the positive
cultural myths surrounding slavery and the Confederacy once held throughout the
United States. It was the combined efforts of all these gatekeepers of values
and cultural imagery that enabled the dissemination of these false myths that predominated
during the late 19th and 20th centuries; e.g., that plantation life was
pleasant for slaves, that freed slaves were not prepared to act independently, and
that the mediocre butcher Robert E. Lee was a great general who fought the
United States only reluctantly. It has taken the Civil Rights movement and
several generations of truth-telling historians, revised text books and mass
entertainments such as “Roots” and “12 Years a Slave’ to begin to right the
misperceptions about the Old South—to change our collective understanding of
slavery and the cultural vocabulary we use to characterize it.
That the ruling elite tends to have the most to say
in what cultural artifacts survive and remain part of our cultural vocabulary
does not suggest any grand conspiracy theory. As C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite, G. William Domhoff in Who Rules America and others have noted,
ruling elites share the same values, attend the same schools, play golf at the
same clubs and serve on the same boards and associations. A conspiracy isn’t
necessary for class action.
Technology plays two roles in the
process of creating cultural vocabulary from the enormous and chaotic ocean of
imagery and information that confronts. From the development of the printing
press to the explosion of social media, new technology has always tended to
speed up both the creation and the discarding of temporary pieces of cultural
language. For example, the twerking fad of the late summer of 2013 lasted much
less time than the hula hoop fad of the 1950s. While technology allows for a
faster dispersion of information, it also fragments the mass market into
literally thousands of sub-markets, each of which develops and speaks its own
language, with its own jargon, each phrase of which could break out into the
mainstream for a few weeks, or for centuries.
But technology isn’t just a
vehicle for transmission; it is also responsible for the creation of a growing
part of our cultural vocabulary: the selfie; the “nerd”; the ascension of Steve
Jobs to a position equal to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison in American business
mythology; calling our thought processes “software”; asking someone to put
something back in its original place by saying “go to default.”
Tomorrow I will discuss what I call the
cannibalization of cultural artifacts as a primary means of controlling and
exploiting our shared cultural vocabulary.
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