Children Of The Revolution

How has communication changed. In the past, our grandparents sent each other endless letters; today, we're sharing status on Facebook. Today, we hope the other will notice the catchy sentences we dedicate to him quoting a television show or a song. Today, if we want someone to indirectly understand something, we share a link on our personal profile.
And that's not all: as I mentioned before, nowadays quotes from Shakespeare rather than Wilde are increasingly rare. I myself have often started my posts here writing quotes from many different TV series or posted lyrics and music videos to express my several moods. Yes, because the truth is that if you are not really into talk or write about yourself, hiding behind phrases written by others and let them speak for yourself (or, even better, to tell you)...It is so bad easier. Perhaps coward, perhaps even absurd, but always easier. And it's good, because some of these sentences are not maybe written by Dorothy Parker, but they are equally wonderful indeed.
And today, after all, communication has become even this: to treat lyrics as if they were amazing poems, film scripts as if they were the greatest prose novels of the past. Frankly, I have always believed that "common" people (so, you know, a singer rather than a poet of the Romantic Age) were those closest to "common" mood and thought of all of us. I find myself much more easily in a dialogue from "Grey's Anatomy" or in Aerosmith's songs rather than in a Leopardi's poem. And I'm not afraid to tell it. And these are the reasons why I often choose to let them speak for me; often, you've got the feeling that a song just knows you so well, so deeply, more than how a real person who actually knows you is able to do, that you feel as you could have written it yourself. Or, better yet, that the singer wrote it just thinking about you. For you, only and exclusively for you. I love going to concerts and I've hated study poetry. I love prose but I rather a "real" book, "raw", "stark" and closer to me by Salinger than a novel by Manzoni. And, I repeat, I'm not afraid nor ashamed to tell it.
The methods of communication have changed as well as have changed (also and especially) its contents: I think to know both is fundamental, those belonging to the past and those produced by our present and imminent future, because only then you could choose and have a preference. I believe it is fair and important to study our past among school desks, but we should give more room to both present and future: I do not expect in a book of English literature to be included The Beatles' lyrics (well, maybe... Yes, I do.), but at least that it didn't stop at the first, remote, half of the 20th century as mine did.
Here's the truth: life changes, but, more often, we didn't together with her. We often stay anchored to our past that, however glorious might have been and still remain, it's always "past" and cannot be so badly integral part of the present, often choking, swallowing it. For example, I think school books are still too bourgeois in their dealing with very dated, courtly, complex topics: simplicity, however, is not always a bad thing. Sometimes communicate in a "popular" way, in its considered derogatory meaning, is the best way instead, the more pure and beautiful one to touch people's hearts. Yes, people: how can be actually negative the fact that someone or something wants directly talk to people? Books, poems, paintings, even historical events, they all need an audience to exist and survive in time: so why do we treat who or what tries to get into public's souls in a natural, spontaneous way as a zero, considered that public would do right the same, just because he/it chose a different way to do it? I know lots of singers, writers, painters and what else who might not be technically as good as D'Annunzio and Monet, but that, personally, I like so much more.
It's all about tastes, always, as it is for all the things of life, but because the idea of subjectivity don't die we need the alternative to resist, we need a World in which it is always possible to choose between this and that, not one in which there is only and always someone else doing it for us. Or, even worst, a World in which there's no chance to choose at all but only a oneway for every inch.
Freedom is, above all, right that: to be able to choose, to be entitled to claim that, in our opinion, Sinatra would have just painted Mozart'ass, that Warhol's reproductions and Lichtenstein's comics are a thousand times better than Caravaggio's Jesus Christ & C., that Baudelaire's got no chances at all comparative to Salinger. Free: we are and we are deeply into stay so.
And Beauty, in the first place, and feelings she gives us are among the most subjective things in the whole World. And as we are free to say if we find George Clooney attractive or not, we want it to be too in thinking and saying if we find "I Promessi Sposi" a masterpiece or just a bullshit.

"Things have changed. People don't just meet organically anymore. If I want to make myself more attractive to the opposite sex, I don't go get a new haircut: I update my profile. That's just how it is."

(From "He's Just Not That Into You")