Nostalgia and Utopianism
I think the Lincvolt is an interesting confluence of things. Young's comments about his latest CSNY movie seem to have a reasonable handle on the effectiveness of nostalgia:
The film will be given worldwide cinema release, but Young has no illusions about its box-office appeal. “I don’t expect it to last long,” he admits. “I mean, let’s be realistic: it’s a film about war and a bunch of old hippies, so that’s the way the public will view it. We spent a lot of time on it, and it means a lot to us, but in the overall scope of things . . . it has a moment, and this moment is coming up, and after that it’ll be a DVD, then it’ll be gone. It’ll be a piece of history.”
And yet nostalgia persists in the choice to modify a classic car to meet future needs. We need both a future and a past, I think. But we also need to be able to tell them apart.
It's not a big truck
Quest may not have a big enough truck
While I find Chuck’s tirade amusing, it highlights only one potential perspective on sharing experiences on the internet. When it comes to sharing creative experiences, the creators of said experiences can and should have some input in just how their presence is conveyed. I remember a heated discussion on a King Crimson mailing list years ago about photographing/recording concerts. Robert Fripp tried to establish his possession that such things were evanescent by design, and that it cheapens them by capturing them in substandard recordings.
I don’t know exactly what I think about this, but I do know that simplistic appeal to mob behaviors doesn’t constitute a compelling argument that everything should be/is recorded and broadcast 24/7. I think that trivializes both communication and experience—the internet is not a big truck that we load our experiences onto so that we can share them.
