How We'll Forget John Lennon

[ProudLib72]

A few years ago a student walked into the office of Cesar A. Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab. Hidalgo was listening to music and asked the student if she recognized the song. She wasn’t sure. “Is it Coldplay?” she asked. It was “Imagine” by John Lennon. Hidalgo took it in stride that his student didn’t recognize the song. As he explains in our interview below, he realized the song wasn’t from her generation. What struck Hidalgo, though, was the incident echoed a question that had long intrigued him, which was how music and movies and all the other things that once shone in popular culture faded like evening from public memory.

Last month Hidalgo and colleagues published a Nature paper that put his crafty data-mining talents to work on another question: How do people and products drift out of the cultural picture? They traced the fade-out of songs, movies, sports stars, patents, and scientific publications. They drew on data from sources such as Billboard, Spotify, IMDB, Wikipedia, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the American Physical Society, which has gathered information on physics articles from 1896 to 2016. Hidalgo’s team then designed mathematical models to calculate the rate of decline of the songs, people, and scientific papers.

The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline. The paper argues that people and things that make the rounds at the water cooler have a higher probability of settling into physical records. “Changes in communication technologies, such as the rise of the printing press, radio and television,” it says, affect our degree of attention, and all of our cultural products, from songs to scientific papers, “follow a universal decay function.”
http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/how-well-forget-john-lennon

So this is a little OT; however, think of the implications for political figures and events (such as Watergate). The last paragraph frightens me a bit. The media controls what makes the rounds at the water cooler, which in turn decides what makes it into the physical records. Anyway, the rest of the article is very interesting as it discusses what factors determine the decay of our society's collective memory.

[MLAA]

1. For a moment I was worried given now everything is text and twitter...

Then I remembered our climate change and how we’ve destroyed the planet, and I stopped worrying about the last paragraph. We won’t be around long enough to worry about losing anything.

[hlthe2b]

16. There is a certain realistic and dark reality to that...

[ornotna]

2. Gone but not forgotten

In Florida at least.



https://www.flhsmv.gov/dmv/specialtytags/

[VOX]

4. Cool plate!

Wish California had something similar, but the state is concerned about issuing plates with any “political” messages. Some years back, anti-women’s rights groups wanted a “ban abortion” plate, which was nixed, along with all other ideas of a political nature. Not that world peace should be forgotten as an ideal.

On edit: Note that Florida offers a “Choose Life” plate, which California avoided.

[ornotna]

6. Yeah, we do have a lot to choose from

Some good ones and some not my type.

[VOX]

3. Precisely why nukes are a bigger threat now than thirty years ago.

It’s been 73.5 years (in many cases, more than a lifetime) since nukes were used in actual conflict, and the horror of that world-changing event gets thinner every passing year. Nearly all first-person witnesses to that event are now deceased.

Also fading is the ability (and the interest) to comprehend the massive scale of death and destruction that only a world war can bring.

[ProudLib72]

8. I had a Japanese friend in grad school who told me a story

He said that his grandfather was playing chess with a friend in Nagasaki when the bomb was dropped. One minute, his friend was across the table from him. The next minute his friend was vaporized. The grandfather was saved because he was sitting right behind the refrigerator.

Now, I don't know just how true this story is, and, admittedly, it has been nearly 20 years since he told me the story. However, I do remember him talking all about dropping nukes on Japan just like he was the one who had experienced it. So, in a way, I guess his cultural memory is much strong with regard to nukes. It's my generation that grew up during the Cold War that remembers duck and cover, the continual existential threat that the Soviet Union posed. I know that it would be hopeless to try and convey a sense of that threat to people 30 years old and younger. It must be a lived experience.

[VOX]

19. That's one hell of a story and it might as well be true.

There are several crazy documented stories of near-misses in the conflagrations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I'm in the "duck and cover" generation as well. We also had a yellow siren that would test-warn for two minutes on the last Friday of each month at 10:00AM. The thought of nuclear annihilation was never far from our minds. Even our entertainments were reminders, as the family went to the neighborhood theatre to take in the grim "On the Beach," or the giddy insanity of "Dr. Strangelove."

Then there was October 1962, when all the parents on our street met to work out a plan... in case. That resulted in a string of sleepless nights.

And you're right, it's impossible to impress upon the 30-and-under demographic how it was a daily concern for the kids of the 1950s and 1960s.

[dawg day]

5. I heard "Stand by Me" on the radio, and thought--

That sounds like John Lennon!
I hadn't ever hear his version of that before. It's pretty good, very touching-- he gets some real raspy passion in the chorus.

[msongs]

7. The Beatles (as a group) will be equvalent to mozart in music history nt

[ProudLib72]

9. I went through a Beatles period when I was a teenager

Then I got into Hendrix. I remember asking a friend of my parents if she had any Hendrix albums. She laughed and said that would akin to someone in fifteen years asking me if I still had any Twisted Sister albums.

[cemaphonic]

14. I dunno, I did the same thing as an 80s teenager

and my folks still had hundreds of albums from the 60s-70s, including the Beatles and Hendrix.

[ProudLib72]

17. But do you still have Twisted Sister? That's the difference

I really don't think it was a fair comparison. The Police? Maybe. Van Halen? Maybe. I realize it was an off the cuff remark she made, but it still shocked me as a teenager.

[betsuni]

10. How we'll forget Lou Reed.

I have a little rant. I'm reading Bob Colacello's book about Andy Warhol and Googled the words to Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" yesterday because I couldn't remember which lyrics were about Candy Darling and which about Holly Woodlawn. Up pops an article about the song being played at a college event and students complaining it's transphobic. School apologized, "we'll do better."

Wait. We have these wonderful computer machines to look things up. Nobody thought to find out who Lou Reed was? It's still in the records! And this morning I read an interview with Reed in the other book I'm reading, Allen Jones' "Can't Stand Up For Falling Down" and Lou's boyfriend in 1977 is a transvestite, the inspiration for "Coney Island Baby." Better not play that song, either.

On a political note, when Googling something about Bob Colacello about fifteen minutes ago, up pops the video of a talk he gave a few years ago at ... wait for it ... Trigger Warning: GOLDMAN SACHS! How anyone fell for the giving-a-speech-at-Goldman-Sachs-makes-you-corrupt propaganda still amazes and sickens me.

[ProudLib72]

11. Snowflakes getting upset over Lou Reed?

I'm willing to bet they had no idea at all who he was.

I just googled and found the article you were talking about: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/may/20/lou-reed-walk-wild-side-transphobic-lyrics-canada

Is Waiting for My Man racist? Or maybe Lou Reed was making commentary on American culture in the 70s?

[betsuni]

12. Yes, that's the one.

What are these damn kids learning in school? I thought the point was to learn how to research things, critical thinking.

[ProudLib72]

13. In one of my classes (freshman college level) I use an image of Warhol's

Marilyn Monroe painting. I like to ask the students who it is. Many of them get that it's Marilyn Monroe. Then I ask who created the image. Only rarely does someone know who Warhol was. We are talking 1 out of every 50 students know. Do you think anyone knows who Keith Haring was? Remember how he actually did one of those ID commercials for MTV?

But Lou Reed?! Fucking Lou Reed ladies and gentlemen, is not transphobic!

[hlthe2b]

15. How is it that so many of the other generations remember music popular decades before their birth?

I knew music from my parent's and to somewhat lesser degree, grandparent's times. Music from my parent's time still gets played on occasion in my home. Going much further back, we, of course know some of the music from the civil war era due to the ever present military and marching bands and use at national events. Of course we know on am admittedly highly varying level, classical music from centuries prior.

So, why is it a "given" that this current generation will (should) know nothing other than today's pop, hiphop or rap music?

[ProudLib72]

18. Physical medium versus streaming is my best guess

There is also the cultural/political context the music was produced in. Some kids might be intrigued by what was happening in the decade before they were born; others, not so much. Notice how you said you knew music from your parents' time, but you only knew music from your grandparents' time to a lesser degree? The relevance tends to fade with each generation.