Pomo “time travel"
One other crucial element of pomo is this: one could no longer see or hear the modern works of the past through the virgin eyes and ears of those who had seen or heard it for the first time decades before. Those "youngsters" who did not live through Beatlemania cannot know what it was really like to hear "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" for the very first time, and unlike those culturally naive, wide eyed yokels who first saw Picasso’s Guernica a half century or more after its creation we pomo folk are far too jaded and media saturated to be “shocked” and astounded in the same way this work messed with the synaptic pathways at the time it was first revealed to the public.
Like cultural time travelers, we can watch Leave it to Beaver and recognize its erstwhile tackiness from the vantage point of our own pomo era and the historical context of the fifties. One cannot fully know the historical impact one’s era will have as one is living through it; it is only in retrospect that one can more dispassionately evaluate it within the larger, more omniscient context of all that came after.
The “beauty part” of pomo
And finally, pomo has helped bridge the generation gap which plagued parent and child alike during the baby boomer era. I have more in common with contemporaries who are young enough to be my children (if I had had any) than my older relatives did and do with me. There are some things that just don’t translate from my aunt’s cultural lexicon to mine. I didn’t live through the Depression, and they can’t even turn on a computer. They didn’t attend college during the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and I never experienced what it was like to gather around the radio during WW II to listen to FDR’s fireside chats. But my “spirtual” sons and daughters grew up, as I did, with television; are well steeped in the culture of pop music, recreational drugs, and a liberal college education (in many cases); and now embrace the internet as avidly as I do.
Moreover, the Internet also brings together the world as a global community, and makes research and access to local and international cultures and artifacts of the past and present almost instantaneous. Letter writing and memoranda in the form of email is back with a vengeance; academic research involves a few keystrokes or mouse clicks rather than hours perusing the card catalog and the dusty tomes in a library reference room or threading spools to project grainy images onto a dirty screen in the microfilm vaults; and one can converse in real time with others from across the globe and have access, along with millions of others, to the latest scandal du jour video clip from YouTube.
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