Inspired by an email I wrote yesterday –
Media is man’s only token for a legacy. The standard rule of law in the past was the tool that allowed us to elevate up the food chain. While watching a documentary the last year I saw monkeys using sticks to stir up ants in an ant hill, this is a definitive sign of tool use. This would mean we are not alone in this world. While we have evolved and our tools are more complex; computers, automobiles, and power over electricity, this is all advanced tool use. It is nothing that makes us special in the evolutionary line.
While some people may argue that fact, the one delineating line that marks people from the animal is media. The ability to record data in some form and learn and evolve from that is something that can make us better.
The cavemen started with stick figures on cave walls. Next, we had the Egyptians who used hieroglyphics in lieu of a written language. Things evolved and over time the written word, starting with stone tablets and animal skins – through to paper scrolls copied by monk after a monk in the hope of preservation of history.
When Gutenberg first opened the can of worms that was the first printing press he essentially invented what would become “pop culture”. The irony is that modern people who hate pop culture think it is beneath the cultured man. The “cultured man” prefers Mozart and Shakespeare – the irony of this is that both of them were pop culture in their own time period. this does not make Britney Spears the next Mozart in the overall grand scheme of the universe, but this does not discount her either.
Classics are what last over time, and sometimes “classics” are lost for generations before being rediscovered and redistributed. Media in our movies, music, and books are all that separates us from the monkeys and it’s for you to remember that pop culture and media are not always beneath you. The person watching TV or movies on the couch all day long is not fat lazy American slobs, they are fans of the future classics and advocates of future revisionists and critics.
