bigideas

It’s always a pleasure to explain to someone about Joey Deacon. Not only because you get to do that thing with your arms at the end like some Jupitus-a-like in a low-rent I love… clip show, but also because it seems astounding that a cultural experience that seemed so universal to you should actually have been limited to quite a narrow generation (indeed ardent Deaconophilia probably dates you quite accurately to within five years or so).

In the age of ubiquitous information you also have back up. That is, what you have to say about what you remember of the culture you grew up in is quite instantly verifiable using online sources: if you weren’t in the pub for the story, then I can mail you the link the next day. Stuart Maconie can go home now, because we’re all making our own clip shows now, ad hoc, in day-to-day conversation.

And two cheers for the big cultural memory hole that is the internet: a hole out of which we can pull everything we need. We might really need it: as we discussed in the Wheatsheaf the other night, our actual sense of who we are is often reinforced by the trivia of heritage rather than the great narrative of history.

But is everything we need there? The problem is not that the internet does not contain everything in the world, just that it’s all that we have access to. If it isn’t on the internet, does it really exist? (Though that certainly sounds like an idiotic question, consider: at work last year I had to set difficult competition questions about bands I didn’t know much about, the answers to which couldn’t be easily googled, but which I had to have verifiably correct answers for. Tricky.)

What could be missing? For a trivial answer, recent YouTube searches reveal that it’s quite easy to find a Teardrop explodes song, unless it never had a video (on the other hand, mere days after I bought the original on 7″ vinyl, this cropped up). There is a heaven where you can replay forever Matt Bianco getting told straight, or even Five Star failing to answer why they’re so fucking shit. But that bloke that Noel Edmonds killed: can you remember: did it happen on telly or not?

Those who argue that our cultural past is a common-wealth usually do so in pursuit of the idea that this gives us a more-or-less legally constrainable moral right to use and re-use this material for our own purposes: the wellspring of mashup culture. It’s less common to ask whether what is there is an adequate common-wealth in the first place. Can you find out what you really need to about the Miners’ Strike, or the anti-Poll-Tax movement from YouTube? Can we even tell what’s missing, if we don’t know it isn’t there?