[53.0] post-hoc apotheosis
and the real-time mediatization of memory
Call me a long-haul Amtrak route because I’m late! I spent three weeks living laughing loving in Europe and simply didn’t have the willpower to clickity clack and serve up an on-time newsletter issue. Consider the culpa mine.
It in issue [50.0], I teased the fact that I would ~*venture abroad*~ to participate in the Latvian Song and Dance Festival, a sort of cultural olympics that takes place in Latvia once every five years and features more than 40,000 participants.
For the most part, it was a blast: I got to reconnect with dear friends, learn which acquaintances have recently joined pyramid schemes, and sing my achy breaky heart out four times in front of 30,000-person audiences. Pretty neat!
But also it was exhausting. I had to wear the same clothes for four performances and they got very stinky by the end! I got soaked in the rain on several occasions and just wanted to curl up into a ball and go into sleep mode! I had a loud and very tone deaf singer right behind me who threw me off! People got on my nerves! Rehearsals went on forever! I had to learn 50 songs and a lot of them were really boring! Going to bed at 2 am after a performance was an “early night” and I still feel exhausted. And festival participants wouldn’t stop trying to start a stadium wave which I found so cringe lol.
Cultural values unique experiences group bonding lorem ipsum et cetera but I think a huge reason why the festival sees as many participants as it does is its glorification in media. The national Latvian TV station (LTV) goes all out covering the festival. Like look at this all glossy glossy!
LTV has been covering the festival since the 80s (though ofc YouTube and on-demand reviewings are a more recent development). I’ve spent the time between festivals reliving or reacquainting myself with the experience by watching videos like the one above. Doing so makes me don rose-colored glasses and I think encourages more people to participate in the festival than would otherwise. A sprinkle of the motivation stemming from the allure of being on TV, a little, but also just a drive to participate in something that seems really cool according to its mediatized depiction. This video is a good encapsulation of that (it’s worth clicking through, pinky promise).
This dynamic doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Perhaps most notably, there were memes already going around about our closing ceremony before the closing ceremony had even finished!
Not saying all of this to gripe. Rather—riddle me this and it’s not unique to the festival—what happens to communal experiences when their canonization in collective memory happens instantaneously and seems almost immutable? Does memory grow vapid without a more digested reflection before our analyses are expressed? Does everything become either a five-star or a one-star review, with little in between?
xoxo from 60% of my face, far left, playing V-list celebrity like I do best :)
Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.