motion zapping megatrends >> by jacob orsted nielsen >> *spark-online issue ten

In a time where so many of us have had contact with the term 'postmodernism' and swallowed the whole pack at the first lecture, how can we keep on writing with a hope for being 'read'? What will my 'reading' unfold since there is no news under the sun? Perhaps my writing only demonstrates a consciousness misled. It demonstrates a motion zapping megatrend. A trend within the trend.

For the last couple of months I have been taking the word 'trend' into my mouth quite often. I used to think 'trend' was something intellectuals used to disregard a culture's 'here and now.' But we've come a long way, baby. What happens here and now is only a little *spark in the darkness.

I can see: Fashion is trendy. Music is trendy. Culture is trendy. Dealing with trends. Producing trends. Consuming trends. Marketing trends. Living trends. Dying trends.

Are my words trendy? Well, words themselves must be one of the longest trends we've ever had, shared across religious, cultural and time borders. Compared to other trends words just didn't pop up and go underground again. No, they arose from the fun of scratching a system of signs into the walls of the pyramid: Prince of Egypt was here.

When did modern man realize he was surrounded by millions of trends? Imagine Fast Eagle the Indian around the fireplace in the late 1850s, looking at his bow and arrow, thinking, "Oh, I'm not trendy anymore." What trends did the Mayflower discover? Smoking tea. Hanging from a pillar with sharp iron pieces through the nipples. The smoking signals. The bomb over Nagasaki was a short-termed trend. The wealth of Coca Cola: a long trendy habit.

Like a train, people jump on and off. Trends.

You build a Web site and it becomes trendy. One thousand hits in a week. You've hit the trendy nerve. The next week people choose a different station, and you are left alone in the gold wagon. You compose a rock ballad. The song goes number one world wide. You are famous. You become trendy. All the magazines and camera lenses come to suck your blood. The next album flops. It's not your fault; the record company chose the wrong kind of trendy title. You write a book; it's not your fault the critics don't like your style of writing. "This is not how it was supposed to be written," they claim. The masses agree: "How un-trendy!"

Many devote their lives to trends. Companies survive on trends. Some 1970s style of drinking becomes fashionable again. The Campari stocks suddenly explode. Their workers feel satisfied. Once again they produce a product which is felt needed.

Imagine: New York if iron never had gone trendy. Imagine: Germany if the nazi mentality never had gone trendy. Imagine: Denmark if farming never had gone trendy.

Then we would still be gathering around the shore.

A train of trends. What a metaphor. In 1960s metaphors in poetry was not trendy. There is a trend in the Arts as there is in the writing about it. The trend is not to show any kind of reference to other trends. The writer strives to produce his own trend. His trademark. Showing off his birth mark. His text becomes a land mark. Touchdown. The critics say, "This is how all Modern writing should be." The masses disagree: "It's just like watching TV."

Trends can be dated. Like history. Now history and trends go hand in hand. Man is desperately trying to stand on stable ground, ground which is not falling apart or disrupted because of a trend.

To retreat to the underground. To look away from where the world is heading. You! Avoid all trends which give guidelines to ways of living or thinking. Flush all your trendy items down the trendy toilet. Then what have you got left? Kitsch? A camp home. Your friends will laugh. You'll become a living organism locked in the bad taste room. Austrian Folk Music will burst your speakers. The chicken and banana pie will burn in the oven.

Zap.

To copy has become trendy. The critics' trend is to narrow down the origins of the "original." The masses love it. "It's funny," they say. Happily living in a joke culture, in the acknowledgment of the fact that Irony has been trendy for decades. After Germany 1945 the most trendy thing to say was, "Don't take me seriously and if you do it's your fault."

You flush out all knowable trends in your life. Except this quote: "Descartes must have been aware of the danger of nihilism which lay in his 'cogito.' In his Meditations he attempts to demonstrate the presence of God in human experience in order to give this experience value. Modern science and the state of civilization in the first half of the twentieth century have destroyed the basis of such a demonstration. But the abyss that opened before Descartes is the same abyss that opens before us today. Man is becoming more and more conscious of his isolation. His sense of loneliness and of meaninglessness is becoming unendurable. For if the world exists because I perceive it, who can prove that any reality, any Ding an sich, underlies it?"

"?"

You look puzzled. Well, it's copied from Hans Richter's book Dada - art and anti-art, published in 1964. A recommendable trendy reading. "Much more interesting than this," the critics say. The masses zap away.

I'm still in motion.

And no one is looking.

Jacob is a 28 year-old man from Denmark. A used-to-be trend lover. Now trying to avoid them, but then finds it difficult to pick up conversations with fellow man and now fellow man avoids him ! Arggghh, it's so complicated . . .