Not a day goes by that I don’t read an article talking about how culture is about to collapse. I don’t know if that’s true. Not a day goes by that I don’t read someone asking governments to “save culture”. I don’t know if that’s smart. Ecosystems are probably going to transform, yes. But the need for culture is way too deep for culture to collapse itself. The government and public institutions have a role to play so that culture is enabled, yes. But should we expect anything more from them than a favorable context?
Surprisingly, the subject of culture seems to be locked in a dialogue between the government and some associations and a few business owners. Whenever we talk about who we actually produce culture for - the people - the only words we hear are derogatory: “look at those careless young people, partying like nothing else matters!”
Well you know what? THEY are going to save culture. So let’s talk a bit about them ok? Let’s start by understanding what they just went through.
Confinement has distorted time, space and social interactions
Time distortion
The confinement and its counterpart — full digitalization — distorted reality. Starting with time. The days of the week, the hours of the day, the dichotomy week vs. weekend have gradually lost their functionality, their meaning, and, therefore, the feeling they provoke in everyone.
Space distortion
Everyone’s space was reduced to the habitat. An area that had become multi-functional despite itself — work, rest, leisure. Reduced to better enlarge itself. Whereas a party brings people together in the same place, the different places of a quarantine discriminate. In times of quarantine, the spatial unity of the party is replaced by the scattering of the confinement. The prism of each person’s screen replaces the unique experience of a party.
Social and Emotional Distortion
Confinement violently attacked the social bond, eradicated it in its primary form, made it complex to organize, and then to experiment with. This was all the more true for festive events: the driving force behind the pleasure of an event lies in the materiality of the experience. The generation of dopamine, oxytocin, endorphin, or adrenaline by our brain during events is intrinsically linked to the direct contact of our body with sound, concrete, people, sweat, bodies. The digitalization of social experience has had the quite significant consequence of emaciating interactions.
While some lucky ones were able to regain the materiality of sound thanks to high-quality home speakers, the de-materialization of the social experience affected everyone. Yet, there are two fundamental problems related to the social experience. Firstly, during festive events, the frequency and especially the intensity of interactions are increased tenfold. We don’t just see each other as friends do on a regular basis; we love getting together. We don’t talk, we scream. We don’t sing, we holler. We don’t shake hands, we hug and cuddle. We don’t yell at each other; we physically separate from the group.
On the other hand, there is a whole range of low-density interactions, felt but invisible, simple interactions in real life, which become complicated, impossible in the virtual world. These are intentionality interactions, mood interactions: saying that we are going to the bathroom for 5 minutes, that we are tired, that we are going to get a drink. A wink, a private joke, or a flirt within a group. These are simple interactions, instantaneous, temporary, but structuring for the group. Digitalization has sent them back into the limbo of the unspoken, triggering micro-frustrations, which, when accumulated, degrade the quality of a group’s social experience. The intentionality that can be expressed physically becomes digitally invisible.
Deep identity, hypersensitivity, and quarantine
By revealing a whole range of burning frustrations, the confinement has brought to light the underlying reasons why, every weekend, individuals of a generation find themselves in festive events.
A generation that opens the way to the era of Deep Identity. One of the critical points of deep identity is its structural hypersensitivity. Let us briefly recall the main characteristics of hypersensitivity:
the depth of information processing
over-stimulation
emotional overreaction
strong empathy
over-sensitivity to weak or subtle stimuli
De facto, hypersensitive people have been collateral “victims” of confinement. Continually searching for the emotional and material intensity unique to festive events — explaining their extreme sensitivity to the quality of the sound system — for weeks on end, they lived in a paradigm of emotional, auditory, and social softness.
The party is a space where the deep identity generation can enjoy both the auditory and organic over-stimulation but also the structural benevolence linked to the unique sociability of each event. Individuals can thus commune with each other without being forced into direct social interaction.
Individuals can thus commune with each other without being forced into direct social interaction
The society of confinement closely resembled the death of all that was the essence of festive events. It thus revealed what made them unique in modernity.
It was a homecoming for Shotgun. We have returned to our purpose: doing everything we can to ensure that individuals, every week, go to events that will meet their expectations, both spiritual and emotional, sensual, and auditory. And ideas by the hundreds have come to us…