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January 15, 2008
Presidents/Precedence!
While away from work for the holidays, I found myself with a rare and delightful chance to pay attention to things going on outside of my typically minuscule and incestuous world. These were mediated by friends, as well as some lovely individuals whose voices I pay attention to through a lovely thing called the internet.
There are perhaps three distinct issues that I had been totally neglecting, but caught up on a little bit in my spare time hanging around in California. Here I will try to elaborate on the first of those three. Later entries hopefully coming soon.
Item One: The presidential election.
Its shaping up to be a very interesting one, and I can’t say that I’ve done the reading or research to make a good judgment about the candidates, but that is not my focus here. One interesting thing I found is that it looks like there are a number of actually viable candidates for the presidency. Perhaps for the first time in my life there is an actually plausible variety of choices, beyond the one prototypical Democrat and Republican. If the previous election saw the nation divided 50/50 into a polarizing liberal/conservative, red state/blue state dynamic, perhaps the upcoming election will see the same giant pie cut up into more bite-sized slices of 8% here, 20% here, 12% over there, and so on. If you want to stick to the Dems you have Hillary, Obama, Edwards, and more. If you go Republican you’ve got Giuliani, Ron Paul, Huckabee, et. al.
I am fascinated by this idea of there being a bounty of choices (although I suppose some would still argue compellingly that there is no real choice, and that every puppet is just pulled by the same strings). And this is a further stretch, but I see this electoral situation pointing toward something that looks a little bit like Japanese pop culture: Everyone has got their little clique. Even small artists can draw a loyal following from their tiny group of fifty otaku fans. Others belong to big jimushos, have a mass following, glossier ads, bigger billboards, and media money. But this doesn’t necessarily deter the fans of the tiny indies. They can be indifferent to the big guys and keep doing their thing regardless. They’ve still got their little corner with a listening station in a record store somewhere, magazines they pop up in, and a regular night at a live house, somewhere, maybe Nakano?
Japan’s pop culture seems happy to cater to any taste, because fans are compelled to be fans. No one has any real excuse not to rally around some little morsel of pop culture because its a certainty that something out there has been designed just for them. And its typically not hard to find that one thing here, as it is in the meatspace of the USA. Now–and perhaps this is thanks to emerging internet culture–the people of America can more visibly and more powerfully rally around any variety of candidate, with any kind of varying viewpoint.
Something I always found curious is that, to me, the structure of the data-space of the internet somehow seemed to mirror the structure of physical space of major cities of Japan. Geeks worldwide took to the internet quickly for its ability to uncover all manner of interesting information and cultural dispatch coming from many disparate places. You could readily find things there–cultural morsels molded to your personal interest–that you would not typically run across in the real world. In the physical space of somewhere like like Shibuya however, you are likely to run across that morsel–that one thing designed just for you–simply by taking a short walk around.
Perhaps its the internet age, the courting of voters through MySpace, and the YouTube-ization of debate that has enabled this strangely empowering fracture of audiences, and the rise of a more specific appeal to discerning cultural cliques with regard to the presidency. Or maybe this is just a strange fluke due to any number of other factors. I am completely open to either possibility, but I would be excited if things continue to move in this direction of a specifically-targeted diversity.
In other words, it would be a marked improvement to me if the presidential race started to bear more resemblance to Tower Records Shibuya. We might have to endure some Death Metal president for a term, but it might be substantially fucking interesting.
Posted by shane at January 15, 2008 09:18 PM