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.