charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

Ray Saintonge wrote

...

Pop culture is as important a part of culture as history or science.

I doubt even the Beatles will have the long-term consequences of Crick-Watson.

True enough. Nevertheless if you ask the man on the street about Crick-Watson you are more likely to get a blank stare than if you ask him about the beetles. Direct consequentiality is only one measuring stick for determining the importance of a person, object or event. Einstein is perhaps the best remembered name among scientists, but very few who remember his name have a clue of what he was talking about.

It will be a long while before we know the full cultural impact of the Beetles. What we hear today of Bach or Gregorian chant is still a modern interpretation of these works, but there are recordings of the Beetles and other twentieth century musicians performing their own works. That creates a different dynamic. Books have fared better because they could penetrate to the masses much earlier.

The image of Mickey Mouse has persisted long enough to motivate the Disney Corporation to seek extensions to the term of copyrights. Cabbage-patch dolls drew their inspiration from the top selling novel of 1902. We cannot know now whether Pokémon will have a long-lasting cultural impact, nor can we know that about any other currently popular offering. All we can do is document what is happening so that our readers will understand allusions to them. We can offer plot summaries and character lists based on these works themselves, but we should not be offering our own analysis about what they mean or speculations about their future impact. That _would_ be original research.

Pop culture is the bunch of sticks that makes flimsy individual elements into something with a higher breaking point.

And when you can't be sure which struts or joists are essential to keeping the bridge from falling, it is safer to keep the sticks in place.

Ec