December 10th, 2008
From Intelligent Life a sister publication of The Economist:
The Age of Mass Intelligence by John Parker, winter 2008
“Russell Southwood is queuing outside his local cinema in south London, listening to his iPod. Hip-hop and jazz, as usual. What is less usual is what he is queuing up for: not a film but a live transmission of this season’s opening night from the Royal Opera House. “I like hip-hop and opera,” he says. “Not a big deal.”
That’s increasingly true. Every other Saturday, Darren Henley is at the Priestfield football ground cheering on his beloved Gillingham. In the evening, he goes to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra, because he is also the boss of Classic FM, a radio station that sponsors those orchestras.
Cultural incongruities are popping up everywhere. When the Guardian, which sponsors the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, picked ten visitors to interview, one turned out to be a check-out clerk at Tesco who saved all his money during the year so he could go to the festival for his holiday. He was far from the most unlikely visitor who might have been found. High-ranking officers from the SAS (Special Air Service), Britain’s crack covert-operations regiment–who have to remain anonymous–have been known to spend their holidays each year travelling from their base at Hereford to Hay for lectures on Wordsworth and Darwin.
…”
Read the rest here.
The article discusses the “wising up” of the population. It is of a similar mindset to my post on television, but with an eye to ‘high’ culture, more research, and a better vocabulary. While it concentrates on the British consuming public, The Economist being a UK publication, there are several examples from US institutions (of particular interest to me, as US resident). I was especially heartened to read about the growing audience for simulcast Met Opera productions, as well as to read about two of my favorite institutions for smarty pants QI and The School of Life (where I dream of working someday).
It does not surprise me that there seems to be a correlation between education level and capacity for heterogeneous information consumption (that is an enjoyment of HBO’s production of Angels in America as well as NBC’s American Gladiators), as, in my experience, advanced education is as much about teaching the student how to learn as what to learn. And teaching how to learn is much more important than recitation of facts. A capable, inquisitive mind can perpetuate itself and will fills its interests with a diversity of information. It is much like that old adage about giving someone a fish and teaching that person to fish. Also, knowing how to learn is an ever more important skill. With technology changing as fast as it does it is now impossible to sit down and read the whole manual for a new computer before turning the thing on. You can’t understand the totality before you start, you simply have to flip the switch and learn how it works as you go.
I read an article this summer, I cannot say where from as I stumbled upon it, read it and then stumbled out again so you will just have to trust me on this, about how more audiobooks are being produced than ever before. Without the need to invest in tapes, CDs, or any other kind of physical storage the cost of production has dropped considerably. Producing a work that would have been prohibitively long, the unabridged ‘Ulysses’ comes to mind, or something for a niche market is no longer out of reach. More and more books are being read and listened to every year. On November 20th the EU launched an online library, Europeana, containing images of paintings, photos, maps, manuscripts, and many other things from over 1,000 libraries across Europe. Upon its launch the site received 10 million hits an hour, crashing the site and closing it for a technical refit and a doubling of the number of servers. More cultural information is being made available to more people than ever before and more people are interested. Its not the end of ‘high’ culture after all, just the end of its restriction.
