Allusions/references To Popular Culture
In "Margaret Atwood, Transhumanism, and the Singularity," Sobriquet Magazine identifies several possible pop cultural references in Oryx and Crake:
"the world Atwood imagines in Oryx and Crake is hardly that far-fetched, especially online. The exhibitionistic website At Home With Anna K, for instance, is almost certainly a reference to Ana Voog's AnaCam and the lifecasting movement pioneered by Jennifer Ringley and her now-defunct JenniCam website. Likewise, many of the other fictional websites Jimmy and Crake visit in the novel have real-life analogues: Felicia's Frog Squash is essentially a crush porn portal, the premise of dirtysockpuppets.com recalls ITV's Spitting Image programme, Queek Geek sounds an awful lot like Fear Factor, and the concept of watching assisted suicides on nitee-nite.com was actualized in our world when Craig Ewert allowed his death in Switzerland to be documented by Sky TV for their controversial Right to Die documentary. Even the seemingly far-fetched idea of broadcasting live executions (which Jimmy and Crake watch on shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com) has already been discussed, with an alarmingly high percentage of the U.S. population receptive to the concept.
And the similarities between Atwood's future and our present are hardly limited to the Internet. There are countless references to events and issues present in today's society, particularly in America. Issues such as manipulative advertisements, casual sex, health care affordability and legitimacy, birth control, food quality, overpopulation, environmental carelessness and reliance on technology are alluded to at various points throughout the novel. It can be argued that Atwood presents and exaggerates these issues in order to draw the audience's attention to similar problems in reality. For example, scientists have recently developed "soggy pork," artificially engineered meat that is eerily similar to the ChickieNobs Jimmy initially finds so repulsive in Oryx and Crake."
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Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)