*tap, tap* is this thing on...?

[robling_t]

Okay, then, after much Pondering (read: having forgotten all about it for a couple of weeks and then had something resembling an Idea), I've decided to hold off on importing the main robling-t.livejournal.com blog over here unless there appears to be imminent danger of LJ Going Boom, and let the DW develop in its own direction, which since the LJ appears to have devolved into the Neat Stuff Wot I found... aggregation point in its present incarnation means that I'll probably be honoring the semi-fannish spirit of the DW founding and putting specifically meta observations and rambling over here. So I'll start it off with one of those "3AM moments of Zen":


Is it just me, or has it been ten years since anything new has managed to break out to the level of becoming part of the collective consciousness? The last actually original properties to make the leap to the point where one could reasonably expect Joe Blow On The Street to have some minimal awareness and recognition of them that I can think of offhand would be South Park and Harry Potter, both circa 1997... IE, right before the internet itself started to break big.

Note that I'm not talking about derivative properties here, like reboots (Battlestar Galactica) or relaunches (Doctor Who) or spinoffs (Torchwood), some of which have broken reasonably well because of... or occasionally despite... the ability to trade off of the cred already built up by their original source material. I'm specifically wondering if we've reached some sort of point on the creatives-to-Suits food-chain ratio where it is no longer possible under the current distribution systems to achieve the necessary critical mass of eyeballs to hit that "...Oh, yeah, I think I've heard of that" cultural breakpoint for new material.

And whether this would be coming from the business end of the problem, where a product has to guarantee X$ will come in before it can get the backing and therefore the Suits will always go with something that they already have some sales figures for, or whether this is perhaps a function of the internet itself having fundamentally broken the possibility of novelty, because if you have access to all 6+ billion minds on the planet you start to realize that everything's already been done so fuck it I'm gonna use my talents to go write Janto pr0n... Idunno. I suspect this is in fact tied in with the underlying problem of the death of the midlist in fiction, which began to rear its head a bit before the rise of the internet and again is tied into those Suit-based business-end issues.

So, are we maybe looking at an evolutionary-level change in The Way We Do Things here, tied to tech-driven generational and societal changes that could well be the beginning of the Singularity, or is this just more evidence that capitalism is finally turning completely inwards and eating itself? I have no answers, only deep-seated grudges against the current glut of comic-book-based movies...

Comments

[erinptah]

This is a really fascinating question, and I'm not culture-savvy enough to have any useful input :/

Would you mind if I passed this to metafandom, if you haven't already?

[robling_t]

{inner Publicity-Whore begins kermit-flailing} Erm, that is... sure. ;)

[jetamors]

A lot of reality TV shows have made it big in the last 10-12 years: Survivor, American Idol, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, etc.

[robling_t]

Hm, I'm not sure that I would count "unscripted" material in quite the same way, though; reality shows are, by definition, a spinoff of reality, yeah? ;) And though they may have wide distribution in their given moment, what's their ongoing shelf-life vis-a-vis future generations coming upon the material and embracing it to their bosom in the same way that fiction (in whatever medium) has historically become part of the collective folk-memory?

It's a point, though, and may speak to that same Twittery social dynamic where we seem to be becoming increasingly absorbed in the ephemeral details of complete strangers' breakfasts rather than anything that takes patience to sit down and create and then sit down and attend to mindfully... Idunno.

[jetamors]

That's part of it, but mainly I was thinking of scripted parts of those show; if I start talking about lifelines or voting people off the island, people will instantly know what I mean by that, the same way they'd instantly know what I meant if I started talking about Hogwarts or killing Kenny.

[emeraldsword]

When was Austin Powers? I think most UK people know that. 'The Apprentice' is quite big, though the only catch-phrase from that would be 'you're fired'. Or Pokemon?

via metafandom

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Hmm, interesting question, and one that is merely the tip of an iceberg-sized chunk of interesting questions.

I wouldn't necessarily know, since I isolate myself from American pop culture as much as I can. But I *am* kind of a politics junkie. So I actually don't know whether 24 would count or not. It broke out, at least as a name thing, among all of the people who watch U.S. politics -- but that may be an artifact of Dick Cheney evidently believing that it was a realistic depiction of interrogation techniques.

[hanachan01]

Although I am far from a fan of it..."Twilight"? It's not based off of any other property, nor are they banking on a built-in fanbase of a certain actor/writer/studio/artist, and it's a huge cultural phenomenon.

It's an interesting question though, and I have been struggling with that last point on originality myself. I'm working on a baseball comic with a friend, and I've been trying to have a good balance of originality and throwing in geeky baseball references/in-jokes. I'll be interested in seeing what others say about this, maybe it will help improve my friend's and my story or at least get us to think.

[ar]

Are we limiting ourselves to things which are really fandom-y, or various bits of media in general? Say Torchwood (ignoring that it's not properly qualified for this, I can't think of a good example right now) versus Shrek (which I think could be argued is pretty well entrenched, and is less than a decade old, though admittedly not by much).

In any case, how about Desperate Housewives? Definitely in American culture at this point, does have a fandom, may no longer be taken very seriously, but damn, do you remember how people talked about it in its first season? Lost premiered that same year (2004), and I think that the masses are fairly aware of it, too, even if most people don't know what the hell is going on with it.

And while Borat is technically derivative material, I wonder if we could count it anyway. In comparison to the film, the original material is so poorly known by the masses that it may as well not exist for most people.

Oh, and Napoleon Dynamite. Super-Size Me, if we can count that. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. If we're not talking about solely big fandom stuff, I think there're quite a few new entries to the cultural lexicon.