LIFE COPYING ART—“INFORMATION RICOCHET.”

LIFE COPYING ART—-“INFORMATION RICOCHET.”. Tom Wolfe has contributed a number of concepts to thinking about society. I came across another one of them recently, although Wolfe had the idea as far back as 1983, as reflected in this excerpt from an interview. Wolfe identified the way that people in real life imitate fiction and gave it the name “information ricochet.” An example he gives is that: “The Hell’s Angels…didn’t exist until the movie The Wild One. They looked at The Wild One and said, ‘Oh, that’s the way it’s done.'” Wolfe goes on to describe the next steps in the ricochet. Roger Corman made a movie called The Wild Angels about what the Hell’s Angel now were and then the Hell’s Angels were influenced by Roger Corman’s movie. Wolfe says that the Punk movement developed in the same way.