Here's an idea.
Popular culture is an abstract location where values
are secured and challenged.
ICYMI, in these final three episodes,
we're talking about the principles
that have guided Idea Channel.
This is the second of those episodes,
meaning that it is our second to last episode ever.
We're doing this in the hopes of shedding some light on how
and why we made Idea Channel.
But more importantly, maybe it can give you
something to use or even argue against in your own work,
or art, or life.
In last week's episode, we talked
about capital "I" ideas, what they are
and who gets to have them.
In this episode, we're going to talk about pop culture,
specifically why I think it's important material
for intellectual investment and why
it's important to overthink, a word which, at this point,
I'm sure will end up on my gravestone.
[SPOOKY SOUND]
Over the years of doing this show,
I've encountered four common charges
against overthinking that I think are vacuous at best.
We're going to talk about them right now.
First is that movies are "just movies," games
are "just games," et cetera, meaning
all you need to know about the meaning contained
in some piece of media can be gleaned
from it's surface-level content or whatever broad ideas
you associate with its medium.
Second, that going beyond surface-level content
to find deeper meaning is "opinion dressed as fact,"
meaning the only significance we should
look for is that which is objectively
verifiable by probably whoever's complaining, I guess.
Third, that in the process of uncovering deeper significance,
one is "reading too far into" a piece of media,
meaning those who created the thing don't want or intend you
to find unverifiable significance in whatever it is.
And so you are bringing said significance as opposed
to finding it, and that is bad, for some reason.
And fourth, why bother?
Shouldn't we all be trying to cure cancer
instead of figuring out what sorts
of esoteric social and political points
can be found in or made with TV shows or, worse, Internet
memes.
Idea Channel has been an exercise
in challenging and, in a lot of ways,
simply ignoring these arguments.
We've held that nothing is just itself,
that the social, economic, and cultural impact of media
beyond whatever it happens to be is not only there,
assuming you're willing to look, but very, very important.
We've held that meaning and significance are deeply
personal, hinging on each individual audience member's
experience and environment.
And that meaning is not at all objective.
Far from being troublesome, this is
what makes meaning interesting and useful.
We've held that the meaning found in media
is often, if not always, unexpected or unintended
by creators, but that it is nonetheless still
"part of the work."
Cf everyone's favorite screed on the complexity of influence,
Roland Barthes's "Death of the Author."
And finally, we have held that such pursuits are
useful, powerful tools in deepening
one's experience of the world.
I partially explained how and why in last week's episode.
We're going to talk more about that this episode and the next.
But first, the principles just covered
explain why we do what we do-- subject
media to a kind of reader response-inspired,
theory-aided interpretation slash deconstruction--
but they don't explain why we choose, like,
"Welcome to Night Vale," or "Beemo," or "Dark Souls,"
"Doctor Who," and "Evangelion."
Why focus on those things?
The quick answer is those things actually
contain theory, that as works, they do philosophy,
or whatever you want to call it, insofar as theory
is the creation and defense of arguments meant
to cause those who experience them to think deeply
about their surroundings and experiences.
There is an argument that the content
of "Overwatch" or "Jurassic Park" does just that.
This isn't a new or controversial position.
Gilles Deleuze, who we talked about in the last episode,
long held that film was important as both material for
and source of philosophical thinking.
Stephen Mulhall in his book "On Film"
writes that certain films aren't just popular illustrations
of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers,
such films are not philosophy's raw material nor a source
for its ornamentation.
They are philosophical exercises,
philosophy in action.
Film as philosophizing.
Writing for the digital science and philosophy magazine, "Eon,"
Costica Bradatan argues that philosophers have much
to learn from filmmakers.
And recently, Jordan Erica Webber
has written severally about video games
as executable thought experiments,
a topic from her recent book on philosophy and games.
I like this argument, and I think it's true.
But I also think it's restrictive.
One common thread across the literature
that takes this position is that the onus is on the work,
that only certain thoughtful works do philosophy.
Stephen Mulhall writes about the Alien films, for instance.
Webber about "Mass Effect."
For me, this isn't enough.
I think all media is capable of and likely does
at least some amount of potentially
minuscule philosophical work.
And I think one of the most fruitful places for finding
media that does that work is within popular culture, which
means we've now reached the point in this video
where I should probably define "popular culture" as we've
used it, so let's prepare.
[RELAXING MUSIC PLAYING]
Now, just to be clear, what follows
is a working definition.
It is not meant to cover all the bases.
For that, please see our episode on this very topic.
Rather, this is a concept of popular culture
that helped me decide what kinds of things
are suitable for Idea Channel.
For us, pop culture is media and goods which
are available to the masses.
So there's lots to unpack here, like what is media?
I think of it as any material communication
made by one person or a group of people
to be consumed by another person or group of people.
TV, books, and movies are media, but so are
text messages, animated GIFs, and YouTube comments.
Goods are another way of looking at media
through the lens of commercialism,
but also they comprise products, like make-up, battery chargers,
and fidget spinners, which aren't
media but are nonetheless aspects of popular culture.
And who are these masses?
Well, that's anyone, really.
Here, mass means a broad cross-section,
a nonspecific demographic, an unclear magnitude.
It's purposefully vague.
To give you an example by way of negation,
opera is not popular culture because it has successfully
defended itself, in the US at least,
from the interest of most people, the masses,
many of whom view it as a high-class pursuit
for boring snobs.
But importantly, this view of popular culture
isn't about what's made for the masses, but available to them.
Most people don't feel as though opera is available,
for any number of reasons.
It's too expensive, too hard to get to or understand,
there are no snacks.
And so it remains, in this very specific sense, unpopular,
though it may, in fact, have a wider
viewership than many approachable things
I would call popular.
For many people, I think the divide between popular culture
and not is the same as the divide
between low and high culture.
And for a long time, this was exactly the case.
The first people to think and write about popular culture
in the 19th century saw it as a culture
of ill repute, something opposed to
their own learned, respectable culture concerned with the arts
and ideas.
And until recently, otherwise pretty
forward-thinking scholars still supported the idea
that jazz music, say, was just objectively better
than radio hits.
To the degree the high-low distinction
ever actually existed, though, it's getting harder and harder
to identify.
To say there's no popular culture which
is smart or artful seems patently false.
And to say that the two strata don't ever mix, also wrong.
Traditional member of "high culture," contemporary artist
James Turrell, influenced one of the world's most famous rappers
and unambiguously pop cultural icon Jay Z,
had a high-profile collaboration with one
of the world's most famous performance artists.
Actors moonlight as public intellectuals moonlighting
as actors, and the revolving door
between a stage and a screen spins ever faster,
to the delight of both industries.
In a way, popular culture is a set of things, media and goods,
but also a kind of abstract location, a place where
the artifacts of many cultures meet, interact,
and get passed around.
Popular culture is so hard to define
partly because it's a place where seemingly
contradictory things mix--
high and low culture, digital and analog,
urban, rural, foreign, domestic, earnest, ironic, public,
and commercial, to a magnitude unlike anywhere else
before being made available to the masses.
So knowing now what we think of popular culture as being,
we can talk about why it's worth overthinking.
Keeping in mind the mixing of seemingly contradictory things,
popular culture is the most prominent and, in some cases
the only, place where vastly disparate outlooks gather,
interact, and have shared experiences
within and around Marvel movies, Beyonce records,
"The Bachelorette," and, if we may be so bold, YouTube videos.
Popular culture can make personal stories
available to the masses.
I think of "Moonlight," for instance.
And it can help vastly different people share an experience
and discuss their contrasting reactions.
"Game of Thrones" comes right to mind.
This helps us develop a common language across many boundaries
for understanding what it's like to be
a human with a unique point of view in the world.
The best-case scenario is that because of this,
our understanding grows.
We learn from and learn how to respect one another.
But lots of times, the result is a kind
of conflict over some piece of pop culture's purpose,
meaning, impact, responsibility, and so on.
Usually what conflict you encounter changes
depending upon the specific object and the audience that's
engaged with it, and we've discussed those conflicts
regularly here on Idea Channel.
But there is one conflict that is
present in every piece of popular culture.
And it's the conflict between producer and consumer.
Between those with the power to create, and therefore make,
widely distributed statements about the world
and those who are expected to consume those statements.
Idea Channel favorite, theorist Stuart Hall,
explains it this way.
He writes, "Popular culture is one
of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture
of the powerful is engaged: it is also
the stake to be won or lost in that struggle.
It is the arena of consent and resistance.
It is partly where hegemony arises,
and where it is secured."
The producers of popular culture occupy a space of immense power
and influence-- social, cultural, economic,
even moral--
because they decide what ends up on your TV, on movie screens,
in video games, what books get published,
what stories we all gather around.
This is how any piece of popular culture
does some level of philosophical work.
Any piece of popular culture is a statement about the world.
By their creation alone, media and goods
help their producers make an argument
about what we, their audience, lack or deserve
or need or should want.
And that argument is philosophical.
Which brings us to "Why bother?"
And "Aren't you overthinking things?"
They share an answer.
Overthinking is a pejorative for intellectual activity perceived
as outsized compared to its subject's
imagined significance.
Cognitive cycles wasted on frivolous ends.
Aside from being a fallacy of relative privation, what
many people call overthinking is just
thinking for those accused.
And I believe that it is a very worthwhile pursuit.
Overthinking is one of many ways to dismantle and examine
the culture that has been given to us by the powerful class
of people who produce it.
The most important culture to treat this way
is popular culture, because of its richness, pervasiveness,
and influence.
The act of dismantling, of examining, of overthinking
is a way to use something available to us
but which is not fundamentally ours.
Overthinking refines our relationship
to our own culture.
It helps discover what about it is good, bad, helpful, hurtful,
interesting, or boring on our own terms.
Though Idea Channel usually took the celebratory tact,
it's important that we do this whether we love the work
or hate it, admire it or are ambivalent to it,
whether it seems deep or shallow, even
if the results are silly, as they have often
been on Idea Channel.
It's important to do this work anyway,
to demonstrate that it can be done
and that we, as audience, are willing and able to do it,
because no matter the thing, it all contains values.
And as Stuart Hall says, popular culture
is one place, perhaps the place, where those values
can be secured or challenged.
This is why we talk about neurodivergence
as it relates to fidget spinners, religion
and "Doctor Who," feminism and "Beemo,"
capitalism and "Jurassic Park."
We use the tools provided by theory
to excavate the values contained within
or realizable through popular culture, which
is defined by plurality.
It's a set of media and goods which benefits from and allows
discussion by broad cross-sections of people
who may not otherwise ever interact.
And besides being fun, we can work
towards determining which facets of that culture
are worth securing and which we must challenge.
That is why we do this work.
That is why we overthink.
What do you all think about our overthinking
about overthinking?
Let us know in the comments, and I'll respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
For the record, I think opera is fine.
I like a lot of it.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding ideas
and who gets to have them.
That will be out on Friday.
We'll put a link in the doodly doo and in the end screen.
A little update about the Idea Channel farewell office hours.
We filled up really quickly, and then we
started a wait-list, which then also, it seems,
has filled up really quickly.
So thank you everybody for being so excited to come and hang out
with us.
What I would say is if since RSVPing you have figured out
that you will not be able to make it,
please cancel your RSVP so we can
get some room for some people who will be able to make it.
We are going to be sending out a check-up email
to say hey to everyone who RSVPed
and remind them that they did so.
We imagine after that email goes out
some space will be made available.
So just keep an eye on our social media,
and we'll put a link to the RSVP page in the description below.
And yeah, very excited about seeing everybody there.
Idea Channel has a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
And you can find my podcast "Reasonably Sound" on Twitter,
Instagram, SoundCloud, and everywhere else you
listen to podcasts.
I started working this week on an episode about bugs sounds
and how insects hear.
That's-- man, I think it's going to be really good.
And this week's Tweet of the week
comes from CheeseMonster, who points us
towards an interesting copy desk question,
which is whether or not emojis should be included in quotes
printed in, say, the "New York Times"
or if they should be described as tiny pictures.
Which, man, if there any copy editors out there,
I would love to know your take on this.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these unrepentant overthinkers.