prosume culture

A good way to understand the self-assembly of cultural hits and how it creates an ordered, synthetic mental world is by way of contrast. Consider Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. The music and libretto together, express a wide gamut of human emotions, from terror to comedy to love to the sublime, and more in between. The opera represents what is most powerful about the Western canon, namely its ability to combine so much in a single work of art. The libretto, even taken on its own, is worthy of high praise but its integration with Mozart's music brought Enlightenment culture to new heights.

Today, we don't usually receive comedy, tragedy, and the sublime all in ready-to-consume, prepackaged form. As I've stated, we're more interested in this idea of assembling the bits ourselves. For all its virtues, it takes well over three hours to hear Don Giovanni straight through, perhaps four hours with intermission. Plus the libretto is in Italian. And if you want to see it live, a good ticket can cost hundreds of dollars plus travel costs.

So we instead pick up the cultural moods and inputs we want from disparate sources and bring them together through self-assembly. We take a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from a three-minute iTunes purchase, and the sublime from our memories of last year's visit to the Grand Canyon, perhaps augmented through a photograph. The result is a rich and varied stream of inner experience.

If you read what many critics say about the arts of the Renaissance or the seventeenth century, it is that human creativity then had a fierceness, a resonance, a brilliance, and a strength that it has not since attained. In the seventeenth century we have Velazquez and Rubens and Rembrandt and Brueghel and Caravaggio painting, Monteverdi composing, and Shakespeare and Milton and Cervantes writing. That's an impressive lineup. It's all so strong and so real. Most of those creations are still available to us in one form or another, at least with a bit of travel or a tolerance for digital reproductions. But in reality this older culture is losing out, in relative terms, to the competition with the internet and the iPod, and thus it is losing out to assembled small bits.

Let's say that you could carry around a perfect copy of a three-dimensional realization of a Caravaggio painting (or if your tastes are more modern make it a Picasso). You would carry a small box in your pocket, and whenever you wanted, you could press a button and the box would open up into life-sized glory and show you the picture. You would bring it to all the parties you attended. The peak of the culture of the seventeenth century (or say the 1920s if you prefer Picasso) would be at your disposal.

Alternatively, let's say you could carry around in your pocket an iPhone. That gives you thousands of songs, a cell phone, access to personal photographs, YouTube, email, and web access, among many other services, not to mention all the applications that have not yet been written. You will have a strong connection to the contemporary culture of small bits. Most people would prefer to carry around the iPhone, and I think they are right.

This preference has led to a corresponding shift in the meaning of cultural literacy. What cultural literacy means today is not whether you can "read" all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other web-related technologies. The iPhone, if used properly, can get you to a website on Rubens as well. The question is not whether you know the classics but whether you are capable of assembling your own blend of small cultural bits. When viewed in this light, today's young people are very culturally literate indeed and in fact they are very often the cultural leaders and creators.

- Tyler Cowen