An early reaction to Metaculture, which I started reading this morning.

In the foreward and opening pages of chapter 1, Urban (aided in the forward by Lee) suggests that the metaculture of "newness" drives capitalism and modernity. Two observations about this:

• LINK: Urban mentions that meta-cultural texts (like film reviews or "news" shows about fiction TV) help accelerate the process of cultural circulation. I'm reminded of a passage in Steven Johnson's Interface Culture in which he predicted (quite rightly, I'd say) that metaculture will be one of our primary sorting mechanisms as the digital age expands.
• Grand narrative: By default, I tend to look at things through the grand narrative of electracy, the emergence of the third age of human communication being a key part of our culture's development at present. Thus, when I read the following, I made another connection:

  The interpretation of culture that is intrinsic to metaculture, immaterial as it is, focuses attention on the cultural thing, helps to make it an object of interest and, hence, facilitates its circulation. (4)

  I locked on the word interpretation because of my interest in the demise of hermeneutics as a scholarly research model. I look forward to examining the relationship of the production of metaculture to the search for something new; to whit, what kind of metaculture is Ulmer's heuretic method?