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Original poster
ArabellaScott · 02/04/2024 12:36

I suppose we're yet to even see the edges of the impact of the internet on society, individuals, and culture.

OP posts:
KellieJaysLapdog · 02/04/2024 12:11

I went to see John Cooper Clarke the other night - support acts Toria Garbutt and Mike Garry.

Was struck by how antiquated they all sounded, all Northern, working class poets between 40 odd and rising 80.

Culture has become so samey, slang is no longer about place or class but arises on the internet and crashes across the English speaking world one teen at a time, like a wave. Universities everywhere teach the same texts, written by nonsensical salad tossers like Judith Butler.

It made me feel really weird, like we’ve given up something precious but no one’s really noticed yet.

Original poster
ArabellaScott · 02/04/2024 10:54

The arts/culture have always been elitist, but it seems to me that there was for a time at least the possibility of working class people making their way in, if they had the skills. Now that we're in pomo deskilled territory and so much culture is about conforming to the current orthodoxy, that route seems to have closed down even further as most working class people are just not able/willing to indulge in luxury beliefs.

OP posts:
Original poster
ArabellaScott · 02/04/2024 10:51

Marchintospring · 02/04/2024 09:43

Some good points.
It’s not just journalism, of course. There appears to be a growing absence of the working class in public life all round. Our captured institutions reflect this; no more money for people who do useful jobs, but endless funds for diversity officers and nightlife czars who probably went to uni with someone well connected. Being working class itself seems an anomaly in a society which encourages malingering and ‘working from home’ – the latter often just a middle class version of the former. It’s so uncool to sweep the streets and stack the supermarket shelves, why can’t they just get themselves a side-hustle rather than waste their lives working for The System? (Good job they don’t, or society would be a starving swamp within a couple of months.)

Sums up what I've said for years. I hate the way anything working class on Mumsnet is seen as a "race to the bottom" when in fact it's mostly just a different way of doing things

I have one friend who is working class from working class parents. She has her own property, her first flat bought from working hard and not doing Uni/ gap years/ holidays in her 20's. She has kids with unfashionable working class names and they do unfashionable working class sports like motorcross and judo rather than tennis or rugby. She earns really well and that's important to her as it is to my other friends in trendy status jobs. I feel she is very much unrepresented.

I did notice the quote about 'rising out of' the working classes.

That hierarchy is still very much enforced, isn't it. There are echoes of the idea that 'rising' out of the working class involves moral betterment as well as gaining economic/cultural power.

OP posts:
IcakethereforeIam · 02/04/2024 09:49

Here's Doug Lucie's, rather scant, Wikipedia entry

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Lucie

Doug Lucie - Wikipedia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Lucie

Marchintospring · 02/04/2024 09:43

Some good points.
It’s not just journalism, of course. There appears to be a growing absence of the working class in public life all round. Our captured institutions reflect this; no more money for people who do useful jobs, but endless funds for diversity officers and nightlife czars who probably went to uni with someone well connected. Being working class itself seems an anomaly in a society which encourages malingering and ‘working from home’ – the latter often just a middle class version of the former. It’s so uncool to sweep the streets and stack the supermarket shelves, why can’t they just get themselves a side-hustle rather than waste their lives working for The System? (Good job they don’t, or society would be a starving swamp within a couple of months.)

Sums up what I've said for years. I hate the way anything working class on Mumsnet is seen as a "race to the bottom" when in fact it's mostly just a different way of doing things

I have one friend who is working class from working class parents. She has her own property, her first flat bought from working hard and not doing Uni/ gap years/ holidays in her 20's. She has kids with unfashionable working class names and they do unfashionable working class sports like motorcross and judo rather than tennis or rugby. She earns really well and that's important to her as it is to my other friends in trendy status jobs. I feel she is very much unrepresented.