Texting and Jes Grewing
One of the last things that we hear from Mumbo Jumbo from Papa LaBos is that the later culture will develop their own Texts for Jes Grew to follow in its relentless pursuit of all things dancing. So the question becomes, has the new Text of Jes Grew been created? And if so, what is it?
One contender that I think for the Text in today's world is social media. Social Media has a way of moving around ideas at an alarmingly fast rate. Sure, this was done through television and other parts of the Internet in the past, but social media does this in such a better way than any of those. One reason for this is that the language of social media is largely based in culture rather than politics. The greatest changes affected by social media were ones which shaped the way people acted, spoke, dressed, etc. Careers were started using social media, and groups of people are looking to monetize off of the culture spawned through using social media...
Another example of the Text being created in social media is the recent and sudden ability for large companies and moneymakers (or the Atonists, form the book's perspective) to devalue the effect of social media to eliminate its effect from the inside out, much like the Wallflower Order did with Jes Grew. They burned the Text, but that was really just a metaphor for making jazz mainstream. This might imply that social media is on the decline, being taken over by mainstream populists, but the difference between then and now is that the social media mainstream players are so integrated into the functioning of the site that they are one of the biggest elements keeping people there.
Finally, I have heard social media being referred to as a city in the 1970's. the argument in the story was completely different than to what I'm talking about, but the metaphor still works, as Jes Grew was specifically attracted towards the Harlem Area in the middle of New York. A similar situation could be going on here, with the invasion of the city of social media being a hotbed for cultural ideas.
These were just a few of my thoughts concerning the end of the book, as we end it looking towards the next one.
This makes...a surprising amount of sense. Like, not only the fact that texting and social media allows people to communicate in a more discursive way, but also the way that large corporations have appropriated social media for their own use. Pretty much all of the social media apps and sites were originally just designed for people to connect outside of a regular day. It helped bring together people, groups, and ideas that were similar, giving them a platform to work together. But today, social media is infested with businesses and private interest groups looking to advertise themselves or sway political opinion their own way. In a way, they've taken social media away from the common people and made it their own Atonist platform. Or something like that, it's confusing.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting take on what the next form of text might be! It also really makes sense the more that I think about it because I believe that if the text was so impactful back the days, then why should it not be social media? social media is like form of text itself and seems to be very impactful especially in our generation. Its also something that both sides of the fight can control.
ReplyDeleteModern day atonists could probably control what see in social media today, just as they've tried to gain power over the text may years ago.
Social media does seem to allow for a remarkable degree of "organic" culture--a removal or end-run around the usual kind of "cultural gatekeepers" that Reed cites as trying to repress Jes Grew throughout the novel. There's an apparent democracy to the idea that anyone can go "viral" on Twitter with a well-wrought comment or observation, and we can see evidence of social media undermining and subverting official discourse all over the place. I don't know if we'd call the media themselves "Jes Grew," or say that the social media landscape allows for the spread of Jes Grew and a decentering from the usual cultural authorities. Examples like the Black Lives Matter movement, #metoo, or the Arab Spring represent people spreading revolutionary ideas without the authorization or ratification of cultural authorities--the very term "black lives matter" originated in a spontaneous tweet, as did the phrase "me too." And both have become rhetorically potent identifiers for people seeking to challenge the status quo. This unregulated, "organic" quality definitely evokes Jes Grew as Reed writes about it.
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