The 80s are calling… or maybe the end is near

Posted on July 27, 2008
Filed Under Blogroll, networked society |

Last minute invitation to a 70s/80s-themed party. Ok, the time period is broad enough but with such short notice the only solution at hand was to go searching online for some clues. A quick survey of the landscape helped me decide for the Grease look.  To my surprise, there was no need for me to go to far to pull it off.  It was a near as my closet: black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, no belt… and quite a combination of contemporary hair products to try to emulate the period stuff. Close enough.

At the party, I was surprised to see that the dominant look was the hippy style–a little off-period actually but probably more of a favorite with the crowd because of the potential good match with certain herbal accessories. After that, and the multiple women trying to get by just on leggings and shoulder pads, the Grease look was big. It seems as if all procrastinators did the same web search and then headed straight for their closets.

This may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Imagine a big crowd converging on the same sites, which in turn start to accumulate generous amounts of good search engine karma. Add the new relationships that those contents may establish in cyberspace with, say, Flickr photos of parties such as the one I just described, tagged with the same search terms. At some point in time, it will all become part of ”our” idea of the 80s and the 70s. In other words, representation overpowering reality, as Baudrillard would put it. 

It reminds me of all the oracles heralding the end of the world by 2012 these days in the History Channel.  The series of programs puts all these predictions together in a single narrative that weaves eerie coincidences on the topic from seemingly disconnected sources–the Maya calendar, Merlin… all the way to the WebBot Project.

The WebBot Project counts on an army of web crawlers (programs) that are, as the coordinators of the project claim, scanning the collective mind of the virtual world.  But they are also ready to admit that at this point the program may be regurgitating the same idea.  And of course, the idea itself is by now snowballing with all the chatter about the subject in the media… and by the insensitive bloggers that cannot resist the temptation to comment about it.  

 

 

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