Popular Culture and the Noosphere

Caitlin Pilette

Summary of “Popular Culture and the Noosphere”

Expanded Cinema Summary

DIG 4905

Summary of “Popular Culture and the Noosphere”

            This chapter discusses the relationship between current culture and the “noosphere”, the “film of organized intelligence that encircles the planet” (Youngblood 57).  This concept suggests that there is another layer beyond the biosphere in which we live life where all human thought accumulates. Youngblood proposes that this is in some ways a “technology” that we use on a daily basis. It is becoming one of the human race’s most valuable and dynamic tools. It allows us to think along the same lines. This new layer gives humans the ability to draw from others’ experiences and thoughts to help themselves out.

            Although, this power can be viewed in a negative aspect, and used for selfish purposes; it allows us to steal. When we are thinking along the same lines as everyone else, it is easy to pull an idea from the noosphere and call it your own. Ideas can easily be manipulated to where they take on an originality when first presented, when in reality they are just stolen ideas tweaked the minimum amount to be different. Youngblood discusses that artists in the media industry are becoming increasingly good at “[disguising their] craft as creativity]” (Youngblood 58).  Conveying this with a comparison to art and entertainment having different limitations, he describes craft as possessing a locality and industry as being universal. Because of this stealing, creativity is becoming extinct. Humans are losing their ability to create original products.

            Using this image, Youngblood continues onto discuss that artists in media possess this amazing ability to be class act imitators. Collecting information from the noosphere, these media artists “think along the same lines” as other media artists. Ever notice how every Disney Channel Television Series in the past six years possesses the same plotline? Any sitcom for that matter reflects the plotline or aspects or characters as some other television show past or present. But because media artists know how to sell themselves, their work is easily accepted as a new idea; Youngblood calls them “merchants of mannerisms.” This is similar to how any artist has to sell themselves in an audition; the goal is to make what you are presenting seem like something fresh and worth wanting. New traits are desirable in a television series, but who said that it had to be numerous traits? Youngblood implies that people blindly view the changing few things about an idea as the creation of a completely new thought. With the skills of a salesman floating around the proposal tables, any show can get on the air these days.

            Due to these similarities, this makes criticism a difficult task. Because of the noosphere we are gaining productions that are basically mirror images of one another, but why do we get so many different types of critiques for the same information? Again, we are thinking along the same lines. Now there comes the idea that thinking is an art within itself. With the noosphere floating around, thinking originally is a new talent. Thinking without reaching into the noosphere for a beginning, middle, or end of your opinion is nearly impossible these days; which is why it is such a rare talent. Because of the noosphere, products within the realm of entertainment remain at the level at which they were created. Youngblood states that this level is the level in which they were created to be in.

            Youngblood then moves onto discussing intermedia in this aspect. He declares that the field of intermedia makes us all artists by association. By watching television for decades, people gain the basic skills to be writers and actors. With the noosphere, we acquire a basic level of skills for most things simply through osmosis. The more exposure we have to the media that steals from other media that steals from other media, etc, the more we can peel away the layers and learn how to do it ourselves. For example, if a dance uses the same movement phrase every other time, the audience will often walk away knowing how to do at least some version of the step. Maybe it won’t look the same as the dancers, and maybe it will upset the performers that have trained all their lives to do these phrases, but people would happily go see a performance produced by the thieves. Like mentioned before, this osmosis is a way to steal; but the ability to steal from a field you know little about and thoroughly understand what you are stealing is impossible.

            Youngblood suggests that because we all assume that we can perform these talents by gaining it through the process of osmosis instead of legitimately working on a craft, we end up with mediocrity amongst the talent. Nowadays, mediocrity is growing, because more people have decided that their knowledge from the noosphere is just as good as an opponent’s knowledge from Julliard. And with the products we are viewing, it seems that whoever makes decisions about what they produce agree that mediocrity should take the stage.

            Due to the mediocrity in television, it is beginning to spread into the cinema entertainment field. Our obnoxious knowledge from the noosphere is growing.  The population’s hyperawareness is heightening and we are allowing ourselves to fall victim to the temptation of the noosphere. Youngblood describes it as an “aesthetic overload.”  We are constantly being swept up in the “current” and will forever be lost in the ideas of others. Lacking originality, no human can generate a one hundred percent individual thought. Our species will forever be drawing from everything to produce anything we can. But drawing from experience is the human nature.