I don't know what it says about us as a civilization that most of our popular culture consists of homages, reboots and mashups. We don't seem to be living in an era of incredible originality, like ancient Greece. It's more of an age of assimilating everyone else's ideas, like ancient Rome.
In addition to recycling culture, though, we've made it more disposable. Funny memes get passed around for a few weeks and are forgotten. Or they mutate beyond all recognition. Either way, they are not built to last.
The new (to me) image blog,
Peanutweeter, is an excellent example of cultural recycling. It re-uses classic panels by
Charles M. Shultz, with their timeless social commentary, and replaces the talk bubbles with the ultimate in disposable communication, out-of-context Tweets.
The result is the funniest comic book hack since
Garfield Minus Garfield. The Peanuts Gang's philosophical musings and sometime nihilist humour match perfectly with the vacuous, drunken, and self-important 140-character-or-less musings of the least silent generation ever.
As one anonymous visitor to the site wrote, "Somewhere, in a corner of Heaven, if you believe in that sort of thing....Charles Shultz has fired up his Mac at the local internet cafe and stumbled upon this website. I'd like to think he's laughing and crying and smiling through the tears of laughter."
And so, in closing, I think this Tumblr is awesome.
See the rest of the Peanutweets
here.
Well, you shouldn't be surprised. Our civilization is based on the American "civilization" and THAT is based on the Romans. The Romans recycled. So do the Americans (they recycle everything except their garbage!).
ReplyDeleteWhat does it say about us? Well .... it says that we need originality. But then again, doesn't creating synthesis from the thesis and the antithesis count as originality?
Da Mutt