The rise of the HIF

Covering some similar ground to The Test of Time, this post by Paul De Angelis on Blogcritics has some interesting thoughts on why the divide between 'high' and 'popular' culture is slowly breaking down.

Craig Seligman once remarked on "...the weakening force of critical opinion in the face of ever-expanding mass interests and tastes". But this change was more than the result of an expanding middle class or more prevalent media. It was spurred on by the rise of the HIFs -- Hardcore Intelligent Fans -- who accomplished two important things:

1) They championed traditionally disparaged genres (like science fiction) and media (like comic books), claiming them as worthy of analysis and serious critique. Academia had failed badly in this respect. For years these things were shunned, and now the universities, instead of being in the vanguard, are trying to play catch-up. But courses on pop culture are like listening to senior citizens use contemporary slang: it sounds clumsy, forced, and slightly embarrassing.

2) HIFs also managed to find alternative ways of getting their ideas out there, sidestepping professional venues by producing fanzines and holding conventions. Though fanzines had problems with distribution, that's been alleviated by their replacement, the internet.

Not that the litsnobs and classical music snobs will concede defeat easily. There are still people that insist that "composed music in the European classical tradition" is inherently superior to all other forms of music, just as there are those that insist that any work of fiction that does not conform to the narrow tropes of the genre known as "serious literature" is worthless trash.

I'm not arguing that worthless trash doesn't exist; nobody has yet repealed Sturgeon's Law. But I'm sure for every SF novel or thriller that's formulaic drivel, there's also a "seriously literary novel" that's pretentious drivel. (or even formulaic pretentious drivel). And for every vacuous pop song that's forgotten in six months, there's an equal proportion of unlistenable classical compositions that have been performed precisely once.