The prevailing mode of research in academia is that you want to find what no one else is looking at and explore the crap out of it. Dive into that niche, carve it out of what exists if you must, but first and foremost do your due diligence to make sure no one else has staked their claim on it. This is a great way to produce knowledge, and a shit way to produce culture.
Culture needs repetition. Culture needs a multiplicity of voices. In short, culture needs movements, or it will never be, much less change.
“I will never be the only person writing about X, and that’s okay.”
As a blogger, tweeter, nascent fiction scribe, I will never be the only person writing about X. And that’s okay. That’s a good thing.
Rather than bemoan the lack of opportunity to be original, the healthier thing might be to embrace it. To shout it from the mountain tops. To foster a sense of pride in sharing ideas and opinions and ways-of-expressing with others.
It’s little wonder that many of us have similar opinions. True iconoclasm may be a myth. There are no isolated test-tubes within which we incubate our conscious selves. We are each of us exposed to shared nutrients and toxins. We choose what to take in and what to discard. And there are so many of us that of course some of us will have chosen to take in and discard almost exactly the same things. Thus are many of us raised in similar vats of culture, allowing us to harbor similar opinions. look anywhere, to any opinion on any subject, and there will be a vibrant multiplicity of voices.
Even diversity needs multiplicity. Needs amplification. Just as we flock together, so must we cast outside of our comfortable nest, to visit and understand and embrace other flocks. But each flock must be just that–a flock. Otherwise we lose difference in the noise. One single voice is difficult to hear. But many voices crying out, in bunches, creates tides of change and opinions to move millions. Multiplicity is amplification. Amplification is the first step in cultural transformation.
Why not share and repeat and re-work a great idea? How else will that idea change anything for the better? Ownership is a dangerous thing…
Rather than feels guarded, jealous, turf-y, we can choose to read one another, share one another with others, and continue writing ourselves. We can choose to embrace multiplicity by amplifying the ways others express ideas we care about; ideas we want out there so much that we wrote about them ourselves. By sharing and amplifying the work of others, we bring these ideas we hold dear to even more people than we could ever hope to enlighten alone. Together, we can multiply the number of people who care, increasing that idea’s importance in public discourse and consciousness.
We can choose to shun the idea of competition, not worry about who’s doing it “best,” but worry that any of us are doing it at all–and support and encourage one another to keep at it. By reading one another, we all learn to do better. We see slightly different ways of expressing the same idea. We encounter slightly different perspectives that can cause us to examine our own and shift it to suit the greater good. By embracing the difference and the sameness, we are stronger together.
I hope I’ll never be the only one thinking and writing about
- gender
- class
- power
- technology
- consumerism
- body politics
- animal-human relationships (bovinity, even)
- the insidious ways that advertising misconstrues and reconstitutes social norms, influencing us without allowing those who live them a say in how we are represented
All these things and more, which are each huge and multiple and deserving of many voices and much attention.
I’m sure many writers have already figured this out. But every now and then I catch myself slipping into that academic fetishization of the new, or else the capitalist obsession with credit, and I needs must remind myself of the good that comes from multiplicity.
We must embrace one another, be each other’s champions, if we wish to change the world.
In the spirit of supporting, sharing, and connecting, here are links to a few voices I enjoy listening to:
Contemporary Contempt 