davidvoegtle.net

Culture’s magnetic forces: “The 10 pop-culture forces that still bind us together.”

(Via Christian Science Monitor.)

It’s sort of a cop-out that half of these are specific and the other half are general, but whatever. It’s a pretty interesting questions: is popular culture really more balkanized than it was? There are certainly more media options than ever before, but there are arguably more people than ever before partaking of popular culture, too. In addition, people are getting much more sophisticated in how they consume multiple media formats.

Up through the 70s/80s, you either had to be home at a particular time to catch your show, or you missed it. Reruns wouldn’t occur for months. Starting with the VCR, however, people began to be able to catch missed television events. Now we have TiVo/DVR systems that make this even easier. And many cable stations besides don’t provide even 12 hours of original daily programming, rebroadcasting large blocks of shows in a rotation schedule throughout the day (and hours of infomercials at night).

The Internet has millions of sites, but studies have already shown that relatively few of those sites receive the vast majority of traffic. Internet memes, I think, sufficiently show that something like a virtual water cooler exists for the passing of such information. It’s been more than 5 years since “All you base,” but it’s still a part of the average Internet user’s vocabulary.

Just because not everyone is participating equally in all of the different media forms is not sufficient to show that we’re more balkanized than we were. 90% penetration by television into American households occurred relatively late, and even then 90% penetration didn’t necessarily mean that most people watched any given show. Many people who had televisions, even then, probably failed to watch them regularly. They correspond today with the people who just don’t get online regularly (yes, they exist).

Anyway, it’s kind of a neat list, regardless. I think that they could come up with such a disparate list at all is an indication that we’re not so divided by a common popular culture as the beginning of the article makes it sound after all.

Technorati Tags:
computers, internet, technology