Flickr, The Library of Congress, And Equality
The Library of Congress has started posting pictures from their archives to Flickr. That is seriously cool. And in case you missed it, NPR covered it this morning on Morning Edition.
And it’s that coverage that lead to this post. Specifically, I got ragingly ticked when I heard the smarmy woman from Flickr prattle on about how having these photos mixed in with snapshots of the new baby or your drunk friends “breaks down that idea that museums are something special, and authoritative and, you know, important, you know?”
No, I don’t know. Museums are special, authoritative and important. That’s part of their magic.
I’m all the fuck for celebrating the majesty of the “common man.” Let’s come together as a people and a world. Let’s do away with aristocracies and classes and all that shit. Or, to quote Oklahoma:
I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’
And learn the words by heart the way you should
I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else,
But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!
But let’s not try to insist that a blurry picture of my fat ass on vacation is the moral, artistic or any equivalent of the fucking Mona Lisa. Or any other stuff that hangs in a museum.
Technology, and the whole web2.0 thing (blogs, flickr, etc.) especially, should never be thought of as a way to bring {newspapers/museums/politics/whatthefuckever} down to the level of the “common man.” Instead, these things should be thought of as a way of elevating the experiences of the “common man” to the level of {significance/art/cultural impact/whatthefuckever} as the things covered by those institutions.
It’s a subtle difference, I admit. But the main point is, humanity should always strive to move upward towards greatness rather than to deny greatness and drag it through the gutter. Egalitarianism should be about raising, not lowering. All men were created equal not by stripping everyone of rights but by ensuring that those rights were applied to everyone, even the “common man.”
In the end, it’s all well and good to speak of “leveling the playing field” - let’s just not insist on making everyone equally ugly when we can focus instead on making everyone beautiful.
I think I might have been less galled if today weren’t Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
