What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy.

"The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward.

My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense to most people today, they'd carried it with them into the 70s and 80s.

An awful lot of contemporary humour simply fades away and maybe one or two key moment carries on.

Future generations may know Chaplin solely from a clip of modern times in the machine. Or know Lucille Ball treading grapes.

"But, tell that to the youth of today, they won't believe you"

Harry Potter will last. I have not read it but god it is everywhere. I cannot escape it, maybe it's less referenced in Asian cultures.

Videogames: I don't play much. But Mario seems likely. Minecraft and Fortnite are very big right now, but they lack memorable main characters so I doubt they survive 25+ years.

Music: None of my favorites but Kanye might have 1 song remembered in 50 years. I know friends who got into music creation all commend Kanye's 'ear'. His music does feel 'grand' more than any other artist I've heard but it's not my thing personally.

Yeah, it's more than a book now.

Maybe nobody remembers the best-selling novels or authors from 1928 anymore, but who doesn't know 1928-debuting Mickey Mouse?

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones.

7 books later, it seemed fairly strange that the characters in this magical place didn't have access to the things we used every day.

For kids born today? They will grow in the world where it is perfectly normal to talk with a computer that is smarter than they are. That will not be a wow experience like the first time you talked with an AI. It will be completely normal, entirely unsurprising, just like you expect there to be light when you push the light switch.

Their world will be far more magical than the one we grew up in. But Harry Potter is stuck in time, forever suspended in the late 1990's as some fly in amber.

Now imagine you pick up a book supposedly full of magic and many wonders. And then the characters have to search through books by reading them until they happen to find the piece of information they want. Thats already laughable to me. How much more so to kids who grew up with talking computers and touch screen phones? Where, of course, the pictures move and you can talk to them.

I could be entirely of base here, but one of the great things about the Harry Potter series was the feeling of Magic. Is the Magic going to be there for future generations?

Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultural inputs as you tends towards zero.

Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.