Here’s a thought…

In America – and of course, many other places besides – religious activists are keenly concerned about the interface of entertainment – images and sounds – and minds.

A recent example is the effort directed against the movie version of the Da Vinci Code (about which, tangentially, I turn your attention to Barista’s thoughts on Dan Brown’s formula for success).

Is there any irony to be squeezed out of this? Perhaps. Let’s try. Religious and moral objectors use phrases such as ‘polluting the culture’, ‘leading youth astray’ and ‘blasphemy’ when denouncing entertainment products they dislike.

Another way of putting this might be to say they’re objecting to the evolutionary potential of entertainment – the cultural morphing possibilities (which, to give credit where it’s due, they take more seriously than neutral observers who fail to understand the mind shaping potential). Their fears of losing influence (that is, dominance of the idea pool) as a consequence of pop culture can be re-interpreted as a realistic assessment of the prospects and not, as those of us who don’t share their preoccupations so often think, merely anti-intellectual or anti-sexual expression or anti-fun paranoia.

In a way (and here, I’ll admit, comes a bit of a stretch but there’s a gossamer thematic thread linking the religious objectors to what I’m about to present) the fretful pop culture watchers are accidentally echoing a thought Gene Youngblood expressed in his book, Expanded Cinema

a work brought to my attention by DataIsNature:

The Intermedia Network as Nature

The point I wish to make here is obvious yet vital to an understanding of the function of art in the environment, even though it isconsistently ignored by the majority of film critics. It’s the idea that man is conditioned by his environment and that “enviromnent” for contemporary man is the intermedia network. We are conditioned more by cinema and television than by nature. Once we’ve agreed upon this, it
becomes immediately obvious that the structure and content of popular cinema is a matter of cardinal importance, at least as serious as most political issues, and thus calls for comment not from journalists but from those who work at the matter, artists themselves.

The cinema isn’t just something inside the environment; the intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers is our environment, a service environment that carries the messages of the social organism. It establishes meaning in life, creates mediating channels between man and man, man and society. In earlier periods such traditional meaning and value communication was carried mainly in the fine and folk arts. But today these are subsumed amongst many communicating modes. The term ‘arts’ requires expansion to include those advanced technological media which are neither fine nor folk.
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full at Ubu.com