A lot of little blogworthy musings on my second-favorite topic have been bouncing around my head. Given that Fr. Alexander observed “Everything in and of our culture is about the Kingdom of God, either for or against,” it may just be that these thoughts dovetail with thoughts about my most favorite topic.

Culture and . . . the art museum

On my last visit to our venerable but modest Kansas City art museum, a museum guard gently chastised me for using my cell phone. Now, not to be defensive, but the ring had been set to vibrate, and when the call I had been waiting for came in, I answered it in conversational tones much more subdued than the people around me.

It makes no matter, I suppose. Rules are rules. The problem I have with this kind of thing is that it contributes to the stuffy, airless and slightly fussy ambiance that permeates art museums already. We’re enshrining “high culture” — all these bygone masterpieces by bygone masters — at the same time that the “low culture” of YouTube and digg and peer-to-peer reviewing and blogs is explosively organic and invites everyone to touch and see and smell and be engaged.

It doesn’t matter to me in terms of keeping art museums around. They are amply funded by patrons and endowments, and if they have to downsize in the decades to come, they at least won’t disappear in this generation or the next. But they have ceased to be alive; they’ve stopped being the place where art happens and started being the glass coffin that keeps it locked away where nothing can touch it.

Children are duly carted in so they can be exposed to culture, but how many of them really want to be there of their own free will? They rightly discern, I think, that there’s very little of actual interest going on there, and meanwhile their culture is waiting for them as soon as they step outside the doors of this mausoleum.
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 … and the cell phone

Not that I don’t understand the implicit disrespect of a person talking on the cell phone. There is something basically rude about a person disengaging from the people who are actually around him in order to carry on a conversation with someone else.

Right now, etiquette — the socially accepted rules by which most of us abide in the name of courtesy and harmony — has yet to include provisions for cell phone use. This will change. Coming up with the social compact is one of the most natural things that societies do. But it won’t be for those of us 50 and older to come up with them. This will be under the purview of the Gen-X, Gen-Y crowd, and they probably won’t do it for a while because they hate the idea of rules for anything. But if they don’t do it, it will be legislated, and that would be much worse.

… and Facebook

I feel like I need to apologize to all the “friends” that I have on Facebook. (For those of you who don’t know, I have to put friends in quotes, because it means a certain thing on Facebook.) I don’t feel like I’ve got the time to really stay in touch the way you’re supposed to on Facebook, but I also just don’t think I’ve got the hang of it.

With great effort, I’ve held my list of “friends” down to about a dozen. It’s obvious that if you didn’t expend that effort — and if you actually exerted yourself to get lots of new friends — you could quickly get 50 or 60. And you could say ‘hi’ to all of them –or tell them you were baking cookies, or ask them to play a game, or recommend a new survey on what Stephen King monster they were most like — at any time. And all 60 of them could do the same to you at any time, besides writing you little messages and starting little one-sentence conversations.

Who in the world has the TIME to do this?? And who has the inclination? If you’re really doing the Facebook thing, isn’t your e-mail inbox constantly twittering with tiny atoms of information from others and demanding that you give atoms of information about yourself? I’d think you’d barely have time to do anything because you’d be too busy telling all your friends what you just did.

I don’t know what happens to the nature of discourse if this is what everyone accustoms themselves to. My reason for wondering is selfish, of course. I feel like I almost never get a chance to express myself in full sentences as it is (hence the self-centered interest in blogging). What chance do I have if I’m expected to keep it down to four-syllable sentences all day and night instead? Sounds exhausting. ( — hey, three syllables. Good! :-) )

… and the changing face of marketing

I’ve been reading books by a New Marketing guru named Seth Godin, and the changes he talks about are actually interesting enough to pass on to people who don’t care about marketing.

The thing is, we all know we’ve grown up in a world so saturated by advertising that it’s almost become background noise. TV commercials take up twice the time they did in the ’60s. Movies are typically shown after 10-20 minutes of advertisements, and goodness knows you’re not free from unwanted solicitation either on the phone, your mailbox or your e-mail.

Most of this is an intrusion, which is why the whole model is now called ‘interruption marketing’ by Seth Godin and other media watchers. The new model — the one that is in play on the internet and other next-level fun like blogs and Second Life — is ‘permission marketing.’ See a pop-up ad on AOL that you like? Click on it. YOU have made the decision to find out more, and consequently, you’ve taken the initiative to follow up on an ad, making you more likely to be invested in the pitch, whether it’s for a home equity loan, a non-profit donation or a campaign contribution. And those people that click through are much more likely than interruption marketing consumers to turn around and tell their friends.

So what’s the takeaway? You’ll see more advertisements and louder ones for a while. Spam won’t go away, because it’s the last and most desperate attempt to hook people by way of interruption marketing. But you’ll also see increasing amounts of click-through ads that don’t just want to sell you something, but want to entertain you, educate you, interest you and make you feel like you’re part of a community.

That is a little sad, in a way, because of course their main interest will still be to make you buy something, even if it’s just a point of view. But at least it will mean that the ‘creatives’ of the marketing world, who have been obsessed for 50 years with trying to find louder and louder ways to say, “HEY! LOOK OVER HERE!” will have to think of something of general interest to say once people are looking.

That’s the good part of it. The bad part of it, IMHO, is that it reinforces and exaggerates the kind of self-indulgence that advertising breeds. Everything is about ME. MY permission, MY choices, MY waning attention span. I clicked on a pop-up ad — thrill me, fascinate me, make me feel important. Though the New Marketing crowd are swooning about the possibilities of a generation raised on permission marketing, I wonder about the effect on a society that was already dangerously self-absorbed.

. . . and the economy

The big roller coaster ride of the stock market is all we can talk about right now, of course. Will it? Won’t it? Will it crash? Will it rebound? Will we go into a recession? Will we bounce back into the same-ol’ boring prosperity that is all we’ve ever known?

The answers change hourly, and they change with every different voice you hear. Yes, no, absolutely, maybe, all of the above, none of the above.

Don’t you get the impression that all the usual information gatherers are of little help in this? We’re so completely materialistic and centered on our shared wealth, and yet we have no more real understanding or control over our economy than we do over the weather.

I think it’s odd to hear at these times “The stock market rose x-number of points based on optimism over the bailout plan” or “The stock market fell x-number of points over fears based on the sale of BigBank.” It’s as if the entire stock market, which is based on the occasional behavior of millions, were one person whose motivations we could know exactly. If Mr. Stockmarket is feeling iffy about the bailout, why don’t we just buy him a nice lunch and cheer him up? If he’s perky over some recent triumphs, we don’t we buy him a piece of cake so the mood lasts?

The more troubling thing to reflect upon is the reality of just who Mr. Stockmarket really is. He’s actually made up of … well, us, you know. Americans who have been able to focus less and less, been less and less interested in the next world (if they think there is such a thing) and more and more on this world. Americans (and probably Europeans and Asians, I would guess) who have been feeling more and more at odds with their fellow man, less and less able to trust him, and who have less and less idea why they should do the right thing when they could do the expedient thing.

There are two other related points, but I see now I’m going to have to carry them over to a new entry.