Culture Spores

Dear Readers,

I remembered, recently, the game Spore that I used to play when I was time-normal. Life here at the University involves a lot of these spontaneous memories, because our revival does not bring every memory with it perfectly. This is one of the reasons we even need a University, or a Department of Anachronism, for that matter.

As I recall, Spore was a game where one designed life and took it through various stages of evolution. Microscope scale, creatures, tribal societies, civilizations, and then space exploration. Sadly, exploration of time was not an option when the game was released, and its creators did not even consider such a phase. I remember that I thought of it as "Powers of Ten: The Game," because it reminded me of that book. Sadly no longer on sale, but remember: There are local libraries. Your contemps rely on this Internet thing far too much.

At any rate, my thoughts on Spore lately combined with my thoughts about Twitter. In its early days, the Internet allowed people to connect across long distances. This allowed people with fringe interests, ranging from the cryptic to the erotic, to connect and form intense sub-cultures. This idea, for a time, fractured the world in that it produced a wide variety of forums and communities for people with extremely esoteric interests.

Over time, though, communities of common interests began to merge through this Internet medium, as it expanded to include more and more of the human population. The ease with which it will become possible to connect to the Internet in most of your near futures will continue this trend. These sub-cultures began to connect; people who liked cute pictures of rabbits now could communicate with communities of people who liked cute pictures of cats. Together, they formed cute picture communities. People who liked both of those things merged with people who liked "photoshopping," and so on and so forth, building constructive internet cultures. In fact, this phenomenon was documented by your contemporary academics with conferences such as ROFLCON, who saw the culture wave developing and decided to ride it.

Meta-cultures began to form as well--the recent Twitter downtime underscores this. When Twitter went down, as I predicted and tried to warn you about, the conventional TV and print media were left somewhat confused about how to structure their reporting, givben that they came to rely on Twitter's "Trending Topics" to tell them what was on the world's collective mind at any given moment. They lost a sense they didn't even know they had, and in that discovered that a culture bridge had built itself between television/conventional pop culture and Internet Culture. A meta-culture, spanning continents, media forms, and other forms of excitement.

How is this like Spore? It is like that game because that game is not really about evolution. What it's about is the reation of intelligently designed creatures. That phrase has its negative connotations, but the game is just that. You design a creature, see how it performs, and then add to it. It's nothing like biological reality at all, at least not until you're designing vehicles, buildings, and spacecraft.

So too has social media designed these new cultures and meta-cultures. They have harnessed the social networks that one used to refer to as sub-cultures and determined where and how they intersect. Through careful application and modification, they found ways to unify and merge, for marketing purposes. The effect, however, was to create people who could relate to each other across vast geographic distances through things as simple as "LOL"s. They took internet sub-cultures out of the primordial memetic soup and made them walk in vast jungles of fiber optics.

And that, my readers, is "damn cool."

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople