Losing Our History In the Digital Noise

Not surprisingly, we're oversaturated with multimedia these days. If you live in a large urban city, you're inundated every second of every day with information. It invades your personal space, your phone, computer, car, home, public transportation, workspace, and school. With this much chatter going on, there's too much digital noise. And after Web 2.0 became a reality circa 2006-2007, user-generated content has exponentially grown online. If we look at Youtube, we're exasperated by the number of videos that are uploaded daily. Now we have too many videos online and we don't know where to start.

Even a Google-powered search engine on Youtube is only a partial solution. After all, how accurate are the meta tags that users place on their videos? Especially when some content creators will game the system by placing popular buzzwords as tags to direct viewers to their videos. For street dancers, Youtube is a double-edged sword when we consider it as a cultural resource. The same for Facebook. We used to turn to public forums to gather information on history from mentors and knowledgeable sources who were willing to share. But most forums have now become venues for digital shouting matches marked by hatred and bitterness. So the communication and sharing of history migrated to Youtube comment pages and exchanges on Facebook.

However, it's very hard to pinpoint this communication when we don't have tools to zero in on these Youtube comments and Facebook conversations. You have to be presently engaged in an ongoing dialogue on these two platforms if you want to benefit. Otherwise, if someone, who wasn't involved in the original conversation, decides to look up the dialogue a year from now, they might find it hard to locate the desired content. Google's search engine won't access Youtube comments like it does with websites. And Facebook's personal pages aren't reachable by search engines.

As a result, these conversations about street dance history become localized conversations limited to the present participants. There's no central organization that's pooling this information together in a public archive for future generations. That level of management has rarely been implemented in our culture. For street dancers in LA, we may have easier access to OGs through personal relationships and immediate community. But for dancers without immediate dance community, they can only turn to what they find online or in movies and TV. Not surprisingly, high profile media like Hollywood films and TV shows become visual references and cultural landmarks for our vaguely-documented scene. How many people are still talking about Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo as references for street dancing? There has to be more effort put into managing and organizing cultural milestones for street dancing.

The popular opinion is that the Internet and online video sharing has opened up street dance culture to the world. Yes, to some degree they have. But these forces have also drowned our senses with too much content and it can be hard to discern what's useful and what isn't. The tragedy that awaits is that the pockets of sharing history that's happening right now online in limited circles may be lost to the greater masses once again. Fifty years from now, will the public be better educated on our scene if there's no central organization aiding their process of understanding our culture? We might be going in circles.