Some of you are already right there
with me, eyes wide, mouths breaking into a smile of recognition. Hey,
I know that song! youre saying. Ive heard
all that stuff before! We used to hear it all the time! I know it
almost as well as I know Old McDonald Had a Farm! Thats
not digital -- thats the 80s! And of course you
are dead right. The 80s
asserted itself most brashly in its championing of form over content,
of currency over quality, and of its own unprecedented suchness. To
compare anybodys efforts to this or that precursor was to commit
a social faux pas that earned you a dinosaur rating from whose stigma
you would likely never free yourself. The new technology! The end
of history! We had all arrived in the brave new world and incinerated
our shared past in the furnace of our own becoming! There was a lot
of big hair and all songs had videos. The beginnings of the next decade
seemed to be developing a healthy skepticism about all this, but the
subsequent rapid growth of digital technology and of the internet
spawned a breed who are utterly convinced that since they havent
run across their ideas in their limited studies, their ideas must
therefore be entirely new.
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