The Somewhat Clogged Culture Pipeline

Serdar had responded to my post that we have replaced culture with economics with one of his usual, thoughtful replies. He notes that our technocratic marketing has driven innovation from the marketplace and we are left with what sells, not what necessarily has value, and that to an extent we have a case of this mediocrity infecting us or becoming a kind of cultural pollution. However out of many of his ideas, one thing comes up I want to talk about: the role of The Pipeline.

The Pipeline is how Stuff Gets To Us. There are Pipelines for food, for clothes, and of course for Culture.

When I say The Pipeline, for the sake of this post, I’m talking the media system we have.

The Pipeline that we have are often built of foundations decades, or even centuries old. Publishing houses, radio stations, movie studios, etc. Huge companies and small companies, various suppliers and interests, and so forth came together to create the giant Culture Engine we have now. Some of it is very old, and it often plays it very safe.

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Join the (Extended) Conversation

I did a post at Fan To Pro that suggested we had an “SF Gap” – we don’t have SF to inspire us anymore.  Serdar jumped on this both at the original post, and in fascinating blog posts of his own he discussed the gap in ourselves, and how we can use technology to delude ourselves.

This is some seriously good stuff, so I wanted to prod everyone to join in the discussion – because there’s going to be more to come, trust me . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.