The cast changes. The relations keep coming back. Popular culture makes visible how complex adaptive systems persist through transformation.
Tag: Popular Culture
We do not simply hear songs, speech and culture. Their repetition teaches us how to hear what comes next, while every new encounter quietly changes the pattern that taught us.
When I was young, I was immersed in the full spectrum of popular culture—stories, myths, comics, and games that framed the world through conflict, difference, and the clean lines of good and evil. What later generations found in computer war games, I first found in Commando comics, Greek epics, Tolkien, and tabletop quests. These weren’t […]
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How Pop Culture Works
A (personal) theory on the persistence of popular cultural flotsam: • Culture as an autonomously self-propagating information-processing system has evolved to encode (i.e. store) itself in multiple, parallel ways – for redundancy and continuity. • The value of such superficially-itinerant, largely vacuous, trashy culture is in the various ways that it stores partial, incomplete images […]
Culture is the logical inversion of the human mind.
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Alternate Facts: Fake Realities
Wow. It didn’t take long for that to escalate. “Post-truth” has now found itself instantiated as “alternate fact” in popular media discourse. Trump’s press secretary did not (strictly speaking) lie, he expressed an “alternate fact”. Not only have we gone beyond an investment in the integrity of at least partial credibility or claim to verifiable […]
