Reading Response: Radical Evolution, Intermedia Network, Popcultue/noosphere

Part 1 Radical Evolution and Future Shock in the Paleocybernetic Age, The Intermedia Network as Nature, and Popular Culture and the Noosphere:

The articles become interesting in temporal context, even though
this was only written in 1970 it feels like a brief
retelling of some past that should feel familiar but doesn't.
His rhetoric is riff with the aqueous glow reverberating
from the American "hippie" youth revolution of the 60's and
70's with his belief that a global worldwide
revolution was being birthed on the earth. Which to the
authors credit was probably the result of his global "intermedia
network" which to him would be credited to Cinema, TV, Radio and
print media. And today would expand to include the
internet. Just as many young people
today believe and feel that something is afoot, some revolution of the social fabric through the internet and other "converging technology" . SO my question is than does every new generation
feel an overwhelming revolution just on the horizon in response to changing
technological innovations?

I really had an issue with some of his arguments, as in
his distinctions of craft from industry and art from
entertainment. To pretend that art was never entertainment
is to affect the attitudes of the intellectual elitism
plaguing the "art" world today.

Youngblood writes:
"One might
make a similar analogy between entertainment and art: entertainment
is inherently "local," that is, of limited significance, whereas
art is inherently universal and of unlimited significance. Too often
today we find that so-called artists working in the intermedia

network are little more than adroit imitators, collectors of data and
phenomena, which they glean from the noosphere and amalgamate
into packages that are far from whole. They're clever and glib;
they've made an art of selling themselves, but they know only effect,
not cause; they are merchants of mannerisms. " end quote.


And yes though the criticism of those "artists" working in the in intermedia network
being glib imitators only ripping stuff off from the "noosphere" may seem rather apropos
he fails to acknowledge the fact that humans not just artists have been constantly
ripping each other off since the dawn of time. What is Vernadsky's and Chardin's nooopshere? really only a cool word.
Man has always been embedded in the web of culture since its coalescing. What it's really about
is as Lars Ulrich so adequately put it is "control". Who is the story teller? old versus new.
The old in fostering the new for its own continued survival
must now defend its relevancy or bear the fate of a perceived nonexistence.