What summer is it?

John Leland takes a good look at the Summer of Love's 40th anniversary in The New York Times, revealing some connections between the definitive hippie moment and today's commercial deployment of it that are more direct than is typically believed. The Summer of Love was a media-conscious event with an organizing body, he writes, and by playing up its role as periphery, it became the center. The result, if we are to follow Leland's conclusions, is staggering:

"To 'drop out' in 1967, as Timothy Leary urged the crowd at the Human Be-In, meant to emerge from obscurity and drop in — into a media spectacle that fascinated the country and a media economy that would replace manufacturing as the heartbeat of America.

Did the media economy's displacement of manufacturing start with the Summer of Love? He doesn't answer the question or even necessarily ask it, but if so, the hippies ultimately achieved a fascinating combination of victory and loss.

Leland's point of entry is the museum shows and staged entertainment events that will commemorate the anniversary this year. He minimizes these events by comparing them to the original. Here's where I think the article sheds light on the cultural moment we're in today.

"In this year’s Summer of Love it will be clear who are the performers and who the spectators, where art ends and life begins."

On YouTube, Justin.tv (as a technology), and other media gathered under the awkward techspeak name "Web 2.0," this is patently not the case. Does this mean we're seeing a new Summer of Love? Perhaps a new Summer of Self-Absorption? (1967 was one of those, too.) Will what we're watching now replace the kind of media industry that makes America run today? I don't have the answers, but it's time to ask the questions. As with rock'n'roll in 1967, we're nowhere near the end of this.