
Our culture has two types of forgetting - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/how-well-forget-john-lennon
======
weinzierl
> We forget Elvis because the Beatles came up [..]

This is how everyone perceives it, but is it true? The Beatles were active
from 1960 until their break-up in 1970 while Elvis worked from 1953 until his
death in 1977. His international hit _" In the Ghetto"_ was released in 1969,
a time when the Beatles were already divided and their break-up was imminent.
In reality the Beatles and Elvis were very much contemporaries.

And as an aside: It always amused me that Tarentino got that right in the _"
Beatles people vs Elvis people"_ scene. Beatles and Stones are compared all
the time because they are perceived to be from the same generation. Except for
the Tarentino scene I have never heard a comparison like that between the
Beatles and Elvis - it is always just Elvis before, Beatles after.

~~~
jeremyjh
The Beatles absolutely replaced Elvis as "The Biggest Thing in America" in the
early 60s. Yes he had successes and large shows after that, but there is also
something that he lost while he was making all those stupid movies.

~~~
krapp
Elvis lost relevance with youth culture, gained weight and became a parody of
himself. He was a one-trick pony (a white artist making the style of black
music acceptable for a primarily white audience in a segregationist culture,)
but inevitably rock as a genre and American culture as a whole evolved beyond
his capabilities.

The Beatles, meanwhile, were constantly evolving and their style changed with
the times, so they were able to stick around a bit longer.

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bkohlmann
I'm impressed by the numerous times the person being interviewed says "I don't
know." Refreshing and reflects and intellectual humility that allows folks
like him to uncover unique perspectives.

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ForHackernews
A few years back, there was an interesting Chuck Klosterman article about
cultural memory: [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-
star-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-
historians-of-the-future-remember.html)

> I imagine a college classroom in 300 years, in which a hip instructor is
> leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music
> with no more fluency than they do the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style
> they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve
> taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock
> songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, its
> origins, the way it served as cultural currency and how it shaped and
> defined three generations of a global superpower. He shows the class a
> photo, or perhaps a hologram, of an artist who has been intentionally
> selected to epitomize the entire concept. For these future students, that
> singular image defines what rock was.

> So what’s the image?

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newsgremlin
>I don’t think we’re amusing ourselves to death. I’m not like that much of a
pessimist. I do think life is also about enjoying the ride, not just about
doing important things.

>And new mediums like TikTok, a kind of Twitter for videos, are great for
creative expression. People are doing amazing little performance skits on
TikTok.

Tiktok I see is just another trend, like Vines, Yikyak, possibly even Snapchat
in the near future.

There are already plenty of platforms for creative expression, the problem is
that young people cannot afford to express themselves, whether it's the
digital paper trail that comes back to haunt them, being buried beneath other
'shock' and clickbait content, and the real-life pressures and expectations.

You don't see any social or political commentary on these platforms unless
it's the latest "beef" between internet personalities. This is all for our
amusement and docile nature.

~~~
onorton
>Yikyak

Funny, I had completely forgotten about it until you mentioned it even though
it was popular at my university.

In relation to trends, TikTok itself only became popular in the West when it
merged with musical.ly, a very similar app.

Those annoying YouTube ads for TikTok you might see replaced musical.ly ads. I
remember wondering if they were the same product rebranded.

------
oska
I know this is a shallow remark and the song was only used as an example but
the forgetting of _Imagine_ can not happen fast enough, in my opinion. It
cheered me to know that there are people unfamiliar with it. Which I guess
speaks to the benefits of forgetting.

~~~
mc32
While I believe in free expression, I also believe the internet should show a
human-like characteristic to forget i.e. old items, news, etc., non-scientific
news and such should slowly decay in relevance and drift downward in indexing,
so that that idiotic tweet and that drunken spouting off by Jill ten years ago
doesn’t haunt her as if she did it just yesterday.

People make mistakes, we are fallible. Unless it’s a felony, these things
should not haunt people who have learned and matured enough to have not made
the mistakes recently (and thus recorded/indexed and available)

~~~
chias
> People make mistakes, we are fallible. Unless it's a felony, these things
> should not haunt people who have learned and matured enough to have not made
> the mistakes recently.

Do you have a personal philosophical justification for stating that a felony
_should_ continue to haunt people who have learned and matured enough not to
do them again? If so, why? (or is this more of a practical "well we don't have
a chance in Hell of getting the Justice system on board to forget felonies"
type of exclusion)

~~~
User23
There is no getting past rape, murder, or kidnapping. Those crimes change who
you are. There should be a social stigma attached to being a rapist, a
murderer, or a kidnapper, even if the felon feels bad about it afterwards.

In other words, the defining characteristic of a felony is that it's the kind
of crime that's so serious that it can't just be forgotten and moved past.
Sadly our legislatures are rather daft sometimes, so many lesser crimes are
legally classified as felonies.

~~~
rusk
_> the defining characteristic of a felony_

I thought the defining characteristic was the extent to which it is pursued
and punished by the law. Off the top of my head I can think of one or two
felonious charges that at least "arguably" don't satisfy your definition.

Law often follows morality but one should be wary of mistaking them for the
same thing.

EDIT sorry I read through your comment again and realised you pretty much end
up in agreement, though we perhaps start at different points.

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ronilan
If “Imagine” and other caltural icons are decaying, then “Forrest Gump” should
display exponential decay.

Enjoy if you still “get it”. It’s a “classic”:
[https://youtu.be/rLDy4Glw9cY](https://youtu.be/rLDy4Glw9cY)

~~~
rusk
Looking at that clip, it's remarkable that Forest Gump isn't just a nostalgia
flick but a special effects tour de force... there's very definitely some
showboating going on at the start with Lennon ducking in and around Forest.
Perhaps the trained eye can discern subtle lighting glitches that give the
game away but in the 90s this was mind-blowing.

~~~
lowercased
the video was great - still seems to hold up ok, maybe because it was showing
something which already looked dated at the time. the voicework got me - even
just a few words in a wrong accent bugs me with beatles stuff :)

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Raphael
"Imagine" was performed at the 2012 Olympic closing ceremony, so at least 10%
of people on Earth this decade have heard it, whether they remember or not.

------
pionerkotik
I still think that Coldplay is going to be forgotten way faster than Lennon
though.

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skookumchuck
> What happened is the people who collected Elvis memorabilia started to die.
> Their families were stuck with all of this Elvis stuff and trying to sell
> it. But all of the people who were buyers were also dying.

I see this happening with collector cars, too. The interest in Model T's has
really dissipated, and the muscle cars are starting to fade, too.

~~~
devereaux
The market price of classic muscle cars is everything but fading.

~~~
skookumchuck
There's little interest in them with young people. It's all old people now.

~~~
devereaux
The fast and furious franchise was all about old people, and mostly watched by
old people I guess?

~~~
skookumchuck
In the first one, the only muscle car appeared briefly and then was promptly
destroyed. The cars used in it were much newer.

I didn't watch the later ones.

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the6threplicant
I call it the cultural event horizon.

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Leszek
This reminds me a lot of the following xkcd comic:
[https://xkcd.com/1262/](https://xkcd.com/1262/)

