Big Ideas

(Warning: some of what follows is specifically British, so if you’re not specifically British it might not make much sense to you. But I think the general point applies more widely.)

This reminds me of the way the “political correctness” that percolated into certain bits of British culture in the later 1980s led to a powerful backlash a few years later. Suddenly everyone was talking about Joey Deacon jokes again not because they thought cerebral palsy was actually funny, but in order to reclaim something from their past that people were telling them they ought to feel ashamed of.

It amuses me that people are afraid of the power of PC to squash freedom of speech. Have you noticed that in the world of the tabloids, political correctness is invariably advanced by a “brigade” whereas awkward non-confirmists (ie Daily Express readers) are a mere “squad”?

But the underdog is an attractive role to play, and PC helped form or validate something quite alien to its goals: a fashion for young adults to retrieve the forbidden playground taunts of blessed memory. This sat within the context of a general nostalgia-fest in which twentycomethings listened obsessively to the theme tune to The Rockford Files (preferably on a scratched vinyl album bought from a charity shop) and laughed at old ads for Persil.

That nostaligia was self-serving and selective; when people went back to the 1980s they found Soft Cell not, as you say, the miners’ strike. If the things we went back to sometimes seemed unconscionable — calling each other “flid” and “spastic”, using the term “gay” to mean “rubbish” and so on — then we emphasised that we were, of course, being ironic.

But in a way we were trying to make sense of our past in light of the present. Perhaps we were trying to construct a heritage we could live with, a joyous, hedonistic, psychedelic, 1970s heritage that was unbound by taboo but that didn’t really hurt anyone. That story survives, in an evolved form, in the lads’ mags of the persent, not to mention Top Gear, a mainstrean BBC TV show in which slurs about sexuality are commonplace.

I think the process of putting old stuff onto the internet is being carried out in just that spirit. It’s not a dispassionate archaeological or archival process at all. It’s a process by which we tell stories about who we were, and how we got to be who we are now.

By Rich on Jan 24, 2008

Rich, don’t get me wrong: I’m not glorifying some rediscovered adolescent sense of freedom to be unpleasant about people who don’t fit in. In fact, one of the things about the size of the cultural memory hole is that it also makes it possible to re-remember other things: one of the Joey links above is to a page or so of Joey Deacon’s autobiography which is actually quite interesting and moving (precisely the reason he was on Blue Peter in the first place) — if you ignore the mocking annotations.

And so though you’re very right that the process of filling the memory hole is determined by our owh prejudices — the things that we value are the things we put online, and that’s the image of the cultural past that we create for others — sometimes the overflow of information allows us to critically reassess what we thought we already knew.

In that way, it is possible to use the hole to create counter-narratives, rather than simply reinforce the rampant twattery of clarksonitis like some Life on Mars where racism and sexism is magically Ok again. But is it possible, that in the joy of rediscovery, meaningful swathes of our history are going to be abandoned? I’m struggling to remember what they might be….

By Danny on Jan 24, 2008

[This comment got eaten on the first attempt at submission, so I apologise if this ends up being displayed as a duplicate.]

I’m guessing that when you (i.e. the post author) say the Internet is ‘all we have access to’, by ‘we’ you mean the man on the street who doesn’t have ready access to specialised libraries, newspaper archives, etc. (and maybe doesn’t know or care about the open access movement in academic research); and that you’re thinking of cultural memory as a fairly literal metaphor: this is how ‘we’ experienced x, and here are the recordings of x to back up the immediacy of the memory.

Missing history is hardly specific to the Internet. From Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity: ‘High on the fantasy wish-lists are the missing 48 of Cicero’s known 106 speeches, [and] the lost books of Livy’s History of Rome and of Tacitus’ Annals and Histories… Where acclaimed literature survives only in part or the full corpus is wanting, absence can seem more conspicuous. Suetonius’s biographies of the Caesars survive…, but we are tantalised by the known titles of fourteen other lost books…’ From your choice of examples, though, maybe you’d draw a distinction between those cases and recent popular experience: e.g. lots of us saw the Ambrosia advert with the reworked ‘Go West’, and yet this ‘national treasure’ of just a few years ago fails to appear anywhere publicly accessible, so we have various partial memories retained inside individuals’ heads but only a textual record to provide a public constraint. (I may of course be putting words into your mouth here.)

I’m not sure what you have in mind by ‘an adequate common-wealth’. Lessig has written about disappearing culture: one of his observations is that the inhibitions on reproduction created by copyright make it easier for things to be lost, hence his reference in Free Culture to old nitrate films which will be dust before their copyright expires. But collectively, we do store a good deal: vast public archives are put together (and attract complaints about minimal usage). It’s just that a lot of material hasn’t found its way onto YouTube or even the Internet Archive: to that extent, maybe it’s less a part of public culture than what it records.

By Robert Seddon on Jan 24, 2008

In a way the playground subversion of Blue Peter’s message about Joey Deacon was a precursor of YouTube culture. By imitating Joey children were able to remove the story from its tightly controlled editorial context and use it freely for their own, unremittingly cruel, purposes. Now with YouTube you can do that with production values that are the equal of 70s and 80s Blue Peter, rather than just trying to bite your shoulder - progress?

Apologies to anyone who doesn’t know about the Joey Deacon phenomenon. Please don’t go looking it up on Wikipedia: you’re not missing anything, and it’s a shameful episode in British youth culture. Still raises a guilty smile though….

By nathan on Jan 24, 2008

So in all it seems to me there are several steps in the Joey Deacon story.

First, as Nathan says, we’ve got the primitive subversion of kids in the playground imitating someone on TV, and in the process appropriating and “remixing” them. Although clearly determined by existing social conditions, attitudes and prejudices, this stage is unstructured and very bitty.

Second, you have the archival material going up on YouTube, and reminiscences appearing on Law of the Playground (I suspect they meant “lore”, Opies-style) and so on. This is a marshalling and legitimisation of the material developed in first step. That’s the sort of heritage-building I was talking about.

As a result, as Danny says, you get a text that you can start to read against the grain, looking for clues about other things it’s not saying. You stop being embroiled in creating the historical record and start doing history.

But to return to the original point of the post, I do think it’s alarming to realise that our cultural memories are less complete than we think they are. Not only that, but that the selection hasn’t been random; it’s been done according to a cultural logic that we’re probably too close to to really look at critically.

By the time we’re far away enough it may be too late for some of that archival material to be saved. Old video tapes of TV programmes from the 1980s have a finite lifespan; I know, I have a few, and they’re in quite bad shape already. If TV companies wiped the originals then those may be all we have left. (I’m reminded here of Danny’s Big I session about film).

But I think Danny’s point is, in a way, more sinister than that. There are things we choose not to remember, because they don’t fit into the narrative. And when we forget (or don’t realise) we’ve chosen not to remember them, they’re gone, because we really can’t tell what’s missing if we don’t know it isn’t there. That’s how the narrative becomes fact; there are, after all, no facts remaining with which to contest it.

By Rich on Jan 25, 2008