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Hey Hoopy
Do we have a Zarniwhoop, Slartibartfast, Roosta, Majickthise? come on who else is out there?
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Before someone nits me, I know that Sherlock Homes isn’t real. Oh gawd I’ll probably get flamed for that now. I’ll shuddup.
It sure does. I’m glad you comprehended that. Rap has yet to get out of that teen angst phase. It will eventually and develop into a mature art form. Some artists are doing it already, I am sure. But these are not the ones that you hear about. Gangsta rap is just inner city street hoods talking about shootings, pimps, and hookers (well some other things but you get the idea). When it finally transcends that is when it won’t be marketed as a teeny bopper set of music.
Elvis will only survive because he was the first really successful rock artist. His music wasn’t really that spectacular. Most of the Beatle’s early work will most likely be viewed in the same way that Mozart’s early pieces were viewed and generally passed over. Partly because they were still expirimenting at that stage and partly because just as you agreed, it was marketed to teens. Their later stuff was marketed towards young adults and the maturity shows.
This is ridiculous. Hip hop is an almost 30 year old genre, and gangsta rap has only been around for 15 of those at most. Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five was creating thought-provoking, important hip hop before gangsta rap even existed. And Grandmaster Flash was only underground to the extent that hip hop was an underground art form at the time - he was big in the rap world.
Even so, gangsta does not deserve the criticism you level at it. The themes may be dark, but there is plenty of gangsta rap with intelligence - try Nas. You may also note, that Eminem has more to say in a single line than the Beatles said in all of something like She Loves You.
Hip hop is a mature art form. It has been for a long time. And just because you hear Hot In Herre on the radio, it doesn’t mean that it’s somehow juvenile, just as Marc Bolan singing “Get it on/ bang a gong” back in the '60s did not in any way diminish rock music.
Of course, by 2503 he may be on his twentieth or thirtieth editor.
Waaaaaaaait a minute … the “IX” part of “IXX” can’t possibly stand for ninety. IX is the Roman numeral for nine. XC is the Roman numeral for ninety.
Or did you mean something else by “ninty” (without the “e”)?
Well look at the time, we seem to be 2% of the way there to 500 years from the last post! But seriously now, I’d say that flash drives require less moving parts than CD’s (which were the popular media form of 2003), so information from modern day is likely to be backed up.
Zombies. They will definitely still be around in 2500.
There’s the argument that rather than our era being well documented, it will be very poorly documented due to most of our records being on perishable media that rapidly becomes obsolete and unusable.
And personally I expect that we’ll only be of obscure historical interest; our 500 years ahead descendents (if any) won’t be very human and won’t care about most of the things we care about, or look at them the same if they do. How much do most humans care about the political disputes of monkeys?
Or of course civilization could collapse or we could render ourselves extinct. In that case we’ll probably be barely remembered even if anyone is still alive to do so.
I realise this is a Zombie, but still an interesiting topic…
I’m not sure 15-20 generations is really enough to elicit such a profound change in any species, evolutionally speaking. (would you suggest that ancient Romans were not human?)
IMHO, two big changes that will affect things - demographics and language. Will people simply be able to easily understand both the music and the written word of this era, if development pushes on and language evolves as quickly as it seems to be doing currently? Will they want to make the effort, or will everything written today be seen in a similar vein to how Beowolf or even Chaucer is now?
Also, current population predictions for the next 50-100 years suggest us reaching a reasonably static global population of around 11 billion or so, with only around 10% of these people being in the (current) western democracies. The additional 4 billion or so will be split between Asia and Africa, the latter providing the greater growth as their mortality rates rise. Another 400 years on and the primary, dominant culture on the planet could well be Indonesian, Indian or Chinese, or Sudanese, and their historical bias may well be towards their own histories and languages, leaving much of the what we see now as the dominant 20th/21st century culture as historically defunct. In other words, Bollywood might well outlive Hollywood in the (future) collective memory.
Well, our version of the Society for Creative Anachronism was founded more or less as a backyard party by a bunch of history and Tolkien fans back in the 1960s, and covers more or less fall of Rome to 1600, and in one of the Honor Harrington books by David Weber she has some sort of firearm [Colt M1911 I think] as a gift from an uncle of hers that does a late 20th century SCA persona.
The horrors of re-enactors doing Woodstock as some horrible mishmash of Grateful Dead and Beatnik … :eek:
What amuses me about this 10 year old thread is how people talk about wanting to preserve diskettes and how, in 500 years, the culture could still create a drive and read the piles of disks we had hanging around. 10 years on I can’t remember the last time I saw a disk drive, and any disks I see laying around get tossed because anything that wasn’t worthy to be copied on is worthless. Over the next 500 years more and more and more of our time will be discarded the same way but a few things will linger on.
The things I think are most likely to last are things that contribute to the historical narrative as those alive in 500 years see it. The most interesting thing about our current time is globalization. The internet, easy travel, and instant communication may have a profound impact on countries. It goes without saying that the world map in 500 years will be very different from ours and I think those new lines will be affected by the technology of today.
So the media that is likely to survive is anything that shows a slice of life that led to whatever major events (according to the future) will occur, stories about those events, and stories about how people adapt to the new world that emerges from those events. There are probably already movies out now that will be more prescient and important in 50 years than they are now but only time will tell.
I think movies of the past few years that may survive are movies about Titanic and the Apollo missions. Titanic films show the end of the era of ocean voyages and shows a slice of life before technology began to truly dominate our lives. Apollo films show an early trip to the moon, details the start of technology and how we used some that was barely up to the task to take our first trips into space. I suspect in 500 years space travel will be more routine but the origins are still interesting. There may even be hobbyists who recreate the Apollo voyages for fun! Which films people in the future pick to depict those events I don’t know. They may try to go as close to original material as they can get or they may choose the stylized movies of James Cameron and Ron Howard but the stories will still be told.
I don’t think our Science Fiction will make the cut. They’re usually films that reflect our own time and as the issues it deals with fades then the movie becomes less relevant. I honestly don’t think Star Trek or Star Wars will make it another 100 years but I could be surprised.
Interesting resurrection. I love how the thread originally died on a whoosh.
500 years from now they’re going to find things like discarded beer cans and shards of broken glass. My apologies to our future descendants: watch your step!
The 20th century was a big one as far as things being remembered goes. Flight, space, cars, the internet, DNA, WW1 and 2, nuclear weapons/power, end of a LONG string of Chinese dynasties…
So if anything cultural sticks for the next 500 years I imagine it’d be from that century if only through ancillary fame.
Buildings: Some of the tallest buildings in the world came into being in the 20th century. I can imagine the Empire State building, the space needle, etc. still having claims to fame 500 years from now. *Panama Canal.
Books: I’m not sure about the pop stuff but I think the “slice of life” glimpses into how people lived in this day will be more remembered. As such, Steinbeck will probably have a better shot than Rowling.
Movies: Hard to say because it’s such a new medium. Again, I would have to say the “slice of life” movies will have more staying power than the pop ones. Titanic, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Saving Private Ryan would be better candidates than LOTR and Star Wars imo.
Music: Toughest to say. I think the most accessible, super-pop songs will last and it takes the music of a megastar in order to make that stick. Elvis, MJ, and jazz would be the only people I can see qualifying. The Stones, Elton John, and Michael Buble’s Christmas album would be a stretch.
But hey, who knows. Maybe Gangnam Style will outlast us all.
I disagree mostly. We already have On-Demand services with huge quantities of movies, and Amazon/I-tunes databases with vast archives of music in one handy storage array. I think it will incrementally get moved along to the “next thing” each technological generation. In 25 years they will be moved over petabit network to organic drives, 25 years after that on zettabit networks to quantum extra-dimension storage. And in 500 years it will still be there in mutated neutrino field matrices.*
There will be some attrition along the way, but vast amounts of modern data libraries will be kept because it will just be so damn easy to do.
*resemblance to serious predictions of future technology may be nonexistent.
Tough to tell what will survive. Popularity of things from the past depends upon so many variables. You need something so immensely popular that it was copied/reprinted/duplicated a LOT, that wasn’t so dependent upon its time (knowledge of current styles, events, etc) that it will still be relatable, and which will last through years of changing mores, tastes, and the whims of history to continue on. There were a LOT of popular authors from the 19th and early 20th century who are utterly forgotten today. Lots of popular and important social movements that are simply footnotes, and celebrities, politicians, actors, and the like who people thought would be remembered forever.
The current popularity of these people or works is nota good guide to their future fame. But look at what HAS survived – James Fenimore Cooper, despite the assaults on his prose by folks like Mark Twain. Mark Twain. Edgar Allen Poe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes looks damned near immortal, although other Doyle works have fallen. Some works by Verne and H.G. wells Even H. Rider Haggard (you’ll notice I mainly mention fantastic fiction. Tough. I like it).
With more recent writers, I’m amazed how many science fiction authors who were big in their day have disappeared. But I suspect Heinlein may survive, even though he is being overtaken by events. Some of Clarke and Asimov, although by no means all. Edgar Rice Burroughs is, I think insured immortality through Tarzan and maybe John Carter. Probably Robert E, Howard, through Conan the Barbarian (And who would have predicted that? Howard only wrote the Conan stories the last few years of his life, committed suicide at 30, and hardly had anything published outside the pulp magazines in his lifetime. His fame is the result of others re-publishing his work, unearthing unpublished stuff, elaborating upon his stuff, and putting it in other media. It’s now achieved a Critical Mass necessary to survive for a time. How long that will be, I have no idea)
Stephen King has a good chance of being read in the future. There just so damned much stuff by and about him in print, so many movies and shows based on him, that it’s hard to believe a scintilla at least won’t survive for quite a long time.
As for movies, I can see the Wizard of Oz, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and a select few others lasting a long time. I’d like to think Stanley Kubrick’s films and Akira Kurasawa’s films will live on, but I’m not sure they have a broad enough appeal to be really popular pop culture I could easily see A Clockwork Orange, once outrageous for its imagery and themes, now seeming much tamer, vanishing altogether, except to enthusiasts.
I suspect most TV dramas, like the old-time radio dramas that still exist as sound recordings, to disappear completely, except for their coterie of enthusiasts.
Our time will just be part of a poorly differentiated Olde Timey Days to most people.
Unless they took a history pill in college or live with the head of an eminent historian in a jar, their knowledge of our period will be filtered progressively by our own discarding of stuff as worthless [Justin Bieber from 2014 onwards], future generations’ judgements about quality [Dobie Gillis good; Gilligan bad] and ad hoc data storage decisions and indiscriminately bad things like the Big One - WWVIII.
That’s what may survive in archives and archaeology, but what will be remembered will be will be those things that popular media cherry-pick as tropes and making them part of a new past.
We may be part of an undifferentiated past that will be called the oil age - Moby Dick will survive as a readable of hunting animals for oil almost into extinction, *Giant *- not for James Dean but the oil drilling and Cannonball Run to show what we really got up to in cars [*Death Race 2000 *for MFA studies]; and all mixed in with other old stuff across several centuries. Our descendants will look forward to their brain-implanted entertainment modules showing the latest 4D date movie - with cyborg Mr Darcy fighting Hitler to control the last oil well in Antarctica. I fully expect it will star the frail animatronic husk of Adam Sandler and it will suck.
And on a more serious reflection - The Long Now Foundation.
The Simpsons
That is all – it says everything worth saying about contemporary society.
I’m not talking about the effects of evolution; I’m talking about the results of genetic engineering, cybernetic enhancement, and other possibilities like uploading the human mind into a machine entirely. 500 years is more than long enough for such technologies to radically change humanity, to such a degree that they no longer will be human.
And was there? Was there?! DAMN YOU MODS FOR BANNING HIM!!!
While I agree that significant advances in genetic engineering will happen in the next 500 years, I doubt it will have an effect on the majority of humans. Most people will just be people like us today.
Which means the most popular movie from our time will be Gattaca. 