We all know “those” people. A new album is released and a day later, suddenly “those” people are experts on the album: “This song exhibits a breathless vocal range I think it was the strongest on the album, to be honest.”
Hmm, well, being honest, chances are that this newfound expert on Andrew Bird’s two-tone production and listless vocal range hasn’t even listened to the album yet. Maybe the person skimmed a couple of reviews and pawned off what was written as opinion.
I won’t lie. I’ve done it, you’ve done it – it’s not a big secret. I’ve faked it before. It’s easy, pretending to be knowledgeable about some groundbreaking news story or award-winning movie.
Somehow it has become almost a reflex to say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that.” I might get asked if I have seen a movie or listened to so-and-so’s newest album so I’ll use my 5-second Google search results as placeholders in my conversation.
I catch myself, again and again, without even realizing, trying to stay culturally relevant in any conversation.
An informed opinion about a topic can even be drawn from just skimming a headline: New album exhibits interesting, esoteric mix of hip-hop and trip-hop.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of so-and-so’s album. For me, it felt like a cool mix of hip-hop and trip-hop.”
This is the current state of affairs – all you need to sound intelligent in a conversation about pop culture is a headline (a.k.a. not much).
Why is it becoming a natural response to flaunt faux knowledge about cultural trends?
This problem will seem superficial and irrelevant to many.
Superficial: yes. Irrelevant: no.
The subconscious need to stay “in the loop” on the latest and greatest of pop culture is slowly overwhelming our sense of rationality and honesty.
Imagine the scene: A student has to go the movies and analyze a film in theaters for his or her film studies class and present the story to the class.
This student’s report is due tomorrow, but he or she hasn’t gone to the movies yet. Rather than go to the movies, the student looks up already written reviews and summaries of the movie online and uses the information he finds to make the presentation.
The report takes 30 to 40 minutes, tops.
The next day, the student gives the presentation and gets a very high grade for thoroughness and interesting discussion questions – all of which were taken from various obscure blogs about the movie. Meanwhile, 100 percent of the student’s material was pulled straight from Internet sources.
This student, in theory, could continue to do this exact thing for the next projects or papers in his class.
This, of course, is plagiarism, but the root of which also exhibits another, more complex problem: feigning cultural literacy.
It’s scary how easy it is to pretend to be culturally informed. Worst of all is the absolute ease in which cultural literacy can be faked, just by frequenting sites like IMDB, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube and reading headlines.
This lack of holistic comprehension is exemplified in NPR’s 2014 April Fools web story, “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?”
This article’s headline complained how no one ever reads a full news story. The story, receiving hundreds of shares and retweets, flew around the interweb. It was a hoax.
While the story’s headline complained about how no one reads stories anymore, the article was actually a prank to see who would actually read the article or not.
At the bottom of the article, viewers were told to like the post rather than share or retweet it, in order to see who was guilty of the exact crime the article’s headline poked fun at.
This subconscious need to appear culturally literate is creating a culture that supports being fake and pretentious over being genuine. When culture creates a system that encourages lying over telling the truth, some warning signs should be flashing, somewhere.
There is a fine line between relevant and irrelevant information. The relevance of information lasts as long as it takes for new information to replace the old (five to 10 minutes).
So, in a way, yes, this problem is superficial. But the superficiality lies not with the problem itself, but with the people – in their own need to remain knowledgeable.
Socially, there is a notion of personal relevance in terms of information gathering, and by extension, cultural fluency. This notion is so strong that people will casually and habitually lie about their cultural fluency, passing off a few minutes worth of skimmed headlines as invested personal knowledge.
The Internet is constantly evolving. It is growing at a pace at which humans can never keep up. The amount of information “out there” is stunning, a pinnacle of human ingenuity.
But the information is coming at us so fast that all we think we can do is skim the headlines, in order to keep up with the pace of new information and remain fluent in the language of pop culture.
Faking cultural literacy is just a natural response to keep from disappearing under the infinitely and endlessly updating information.
We don’t want to be irrelevant, but we can’t lose ourselves in the process either.
What’s the answer? Click retweet to find out.
email: brian.windschitl@ubspectrum.com
