Word: communalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...take any empty seat for free. Except that the night I saw Hair, the house was full, so the ushers had to sit on the aisle steps in the balcony. Which turned out to be the perfect way to experience the celebrated "tribal rock musical" that brought the communal spirit of the '60s youth culture to Broadway for the first time. It was the greatest night of my theater life...
Hair was a breakthrough not just in themes but also in form. The story is little more than a series of vignettes revolving around a communal-living group headed by the fiery, free-spirited Berger and the more conflicted refugee from Queens, Claude. (A New York Times critic, quaintly, said the show reminded him of 1920s off-Broadway revues--"the bright impudence of The Grand Street Follies and The Garrick Gaieties.") The score by Galt MacDermot--a musician who was nearing 40, loved jazz and favored suits and ties, the straight man out in this band of hippie-artists...
...have been doing him a service, but I was afraid of reprisals. Everyone is a parent, that is what keeps you from hoping... They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance." As Fiennes spat out this comic misanthropy, the audience let out communal barks of involuntary, sometimes chagrined giddiness, and at the end erupted in applause...
...trends in Western thought eroded this attitude. In the Renaissance, the concept of individual "genius" developed as part of a larger project of extracting individual identity out of the medieval communal ideal; during the Romantic age a couple of hundred years later, when individualism reached a level close to fetishism, the importance of authorship grew correspondingly. The Enlightenment, with its fascination with the precise material origins of everything, also contributed to the Google-gotcha culture we live in today...
...from taking it at face value. Maybe commenters are just on one side of a cultural disconnect between two incompatible ideas of what the social conventions of the Internet should be. One is based on the standards of real-world, off-line politeness. The other is a kind of communal game in which whoever is cleverest and pushes the most buttons wins...