Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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> I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.

Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.

How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.

Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.

Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.

Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.

Counterpoint: the past continues to inspire, surprise, and delight.

Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.

“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.

The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.

I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.

Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.

Yes, Homer will outlive us all, but what 20th century film is likely to have Homer’s longevity?

I think people will still be playing Tetris and reading Homer in a thousand years, but I’m not confident at all that they’ll be watching any of our videos.

I’ve read Marcus Aurelius‘s meditations, a few Greek plays and studied kung-fu movies and Japanese cinema critically. People still endure reading Madame Bovary.

Time stands still for no man, but we’re a curious people, and folks will search for meaning in the past through our art. As a parody of the traditional action movie, I’m sure people will be watching Last Action Hero for decades to come.

I think as time goes on the emotional hooks of media outside of universal themes fade away. My son will never know the time where “It’s a Wonderful Life” impacted my parents, or how the endless repeating of of “A Christmas Story” was a part of my siblings holiday. But the stories that are important to us or capture a moment of time will endure.

Time And Tide Wait For Gnome Ann

https://m.xkcd.com/1704/

>How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?

How many do you read from 10 years ago? Newspapers aren’t really meant to be “timeless”. They are specifically to inform people of what is going on at that moment. I’ve read books from the 1700s. I’ve looked at paintings and sculptures, watched plays written, and read about the lives of important people of the 1700s.

I do agree that most of our culture will be irrelevant to people of the future as entertainment, but will be invaluable as history. If you want to tell a story that is relevant to modern people, tell that story. Movies are remade/rebooted/gender swapped/set in new countries/etc. all the time. You don’t have to replace the original with a “fixed” version so that almost no one can experience anything but the update. We have dozens of retellings of Romeo and Juliet but the original(ish) play is still readily available. Just because new generations will have their own entertainment doesn’t mean we should overwrite ours and present it as if history doesn’t exist and everything revolves around and reflects the current culture and always has.

Speaking of Last Action Hero, those movies won’t ever be box office hits again but the action movies and political thrillers do tell us a lot about America’s anxiety and uncertainty about our place in world affairs in the post-Cold War world. They are interesting to revisit in the same way Casablanca is interesting to revisit and think about the context for a movie made about WWII when we didn’t know what the outcome of WWII would be.

"How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?"

Social history interests me. So does genealogy, although I am the apprentice. My family tree has over 150,000 records in it - thanks to my uncle's painstaking research.

I generally try to read summations by people who have read all those articles but I am happy to dive in myself if I have to.

Just off the top of my head: A great example of trying to get inside the thoughts and ideas of a long departed peoples - "Courtesans and Fishcakes". That book deals with the cultural mores of ordinary people not gods and kings and legends and stuff.

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