The death of uncool

In a recent article, Brian Eno discusses the death of uncool (via):

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

To an extent, I agree with Eno--the networked sharing of everything these days is spurring a creative culture unlike anything we've ever seen. However, I often worry that with this new found culture of omniscient awesomeness we are losing skills of critical analysis. Through all the bits and pieces of information, we still need to be able to decide on what's "uncool." Not in the sense of what's undesirable, but in the sense of what's more valuable and important in certain contexts and periods of time. When we lose the ability to distinguish value--for example, in writing--we lose the ability connect and interpret the mounds of data that are coming at us. Writers and communicators that learn to harness and sift through information critically will be most successful, but those who simply think that everything is cool will be in trouble.