I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about the way people tell stories – about themselves, about each other – to create a sense of identity and self-knowledge, to guide future actions, etc. I’ve been thinking about how these stories are continually revised, updated, reverted, and changed.

So it was with interest that I came across this post about the cultural memory of social morés. It seems David Brooks wrote some column lamenting the loss of romanticism in the “twitter age” or some such nonsense. I’d caught glimpses of Ezra Klein criticizing him, but this seems the best observation to me:

…there’s a rea­son why he called it the “Happy Days” era: the past he’s describ­ing isn’t really the past, but a 70s-era TV ver­sion of the past. Not even the past’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of itself! For that, you’d have to see On the Water­front or read On the Road or Giovanni’s Room. It’s mem­ory as ide­ol­ogy, cre­ated (whether con­sciously or uncon­sciously) to sur­rep­ti­tiously win argu­ments about the present, espe­cially about social morés and gen­er­a­tional change.

And the Happy Days era — the real one, which was reflected in the TV show like a fun­house mir­ror — was dri­ven by tech­no­log­i­cal and social change, too! Kids had access to cars, tele­phones, TV, records and the radio, and dis­pos­able cash. Cruis­ing, malt shops, high school dances, drive-in movies, every­thing you see in Amer­i­can Graf­fiti — it might feel like part of the time­less social rit­ual now, but then, it was a rev­o­lu­tion, a set of truly rad­i­cal acts. Add the pill, civil rights, and a swelling in the ranks of col­lege stu­dents, and you’ve got fem­i­nism, counter-culture, the sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion. But in some ways, this was a post­script. The most impor­tant changes, the sub­ter­ranean ones, had all hap­pened already.

As someone who has often had an attraction to various depicted eras in theater, books, film, and television, and as someone with a renewed interest in the study of culture in general, it’s a useful insight and reminder that the way societies dream about themselves rarely represents the reality “on the ground,” so to speak. And one of the hallmarks of society since the industrial age, or perhaps slightly before, has been somewhat constant social change, combatted by regressives and curmudgeonly types of all kinds.

Much like language, sexual behaviors and courtship will be what they will be. There’s no right or wrong way. Welcome to humanity, twitter & facebook. Your time is likely short; you’d better enjoy it!