I always thought part of plenitude was that common references of all sorts were breaking down as the culture fragmented. A guy like Dennis Miller used to make a good living by concatenating huge strings of references of which any particular auditor would know only a fraction. Part of the humor was laughing even when you didn’t get it because Miller’s delivery convinced you that if you had known the reference you’d have found it hilarious. I think we’re all in for a long spell of having to be Dennis Miller if we want to exploit references of any kind.

I read books and watch films all the time, and often when I make references, they have to be oblique in order not to alienate the person who hasn’t read it. (BTW, I haven’t seen Swimming with Sharks!).

When we start talking about cultural currency and reference points, we end up pointing to works by big media companies, big monstrous mediocrities that they are. Sorry to say that the shared cultural reference points are whatever Time-Warner or Viacom are pushing at the moment.

Maybe Mr. Rudin objected to the reference, and the writers tried to be subtle?

http://www.mashby.com/images/posts/jump_the_shark.gif

(I would have embedded it as an image, but that appears not to be allowed.)

P.S. As I write this, I note an email from Syndic8:

We’ve got a cool new feature on Syndic8. You can now upload a picture of your choice to your account, and it will be displayed in various places on the site.

Peter, This could be so, but my inclination is to think that the po mo model is an add-on one. New modalities, cultural or otherwise, don’t so much supplant the old as join it, giving us, in the process, a new multiplicity of option and strange new interactions to boot. But that’s just me. The Cambridge reference is a fascinating one. Thanks, Grant

Conchis, thanks for the clear thinking and the polling. Apparently, I misunderstand this film’s influence. Best, Grant
p.s., I wish there were some measure for this sort of thing. Imdbpro gives the box office numbers which were small. But this would be true probably for everything done by Jarmusch and Linklater. It would be great NetFlix or Blockbuster would release their rental numbers.

Well, if they’re under 27-28, then they would have been too young to see it when it came out, and could easily have passed them by. Quick straw poll of my friends around this age group suggests that I’m far from the only one who had never heard of the movie.

None of which is to deny the main point however…

I believe we are at the cusp of a change in the artefactual focus of western culture from text to image. For 250 years, our entire culture and education system has been designed around text, its consumption (reading) and production (writing), with written words favoured in our culture over spoken, words favoured over images, documents favoured over performances, and persistent artefacts favoured over ephemera. (e.g., how many libraries of advertisements do you know of?)

As you say, this change is due to the rise of movies and TV – and computer games – and the development of a literacy and numeracy of image in the young. (We even have no word, equivalent to “literacy” or “numeracy”, to describe an ability to parse and manipulate images.) One manifestation of this change (and a very good one, IMHO) is the adoption of graphical user interfaces and graphical programming languages at the expense of command-line interfaces (such as DOS) and languages in computing.

I trace the start of the dominance of text in our culture to the mid-18th century, when Cambridge University switched from oral examinations to written ones for the Mathematics Tripos, a difficult exam which was compulsory for all graduates of Cambridge until 1909. This switch was undertaken despite fierce opposition from faculty who argued that written exams could not adequately test a student’s knowledge of math, since all students would receive the same questions. Russia, no slouch at producing great mathematicians, still tests university mathematics orally.