Pop Culture Is Dead, Didn’t They Tell You?

Photo Credit: Azam Hostetler

When my father was young, over half a billion people watched Apollo 11’s moon mission in 1969. Everyone heard the same artists on the radio and tens of millions watched All In The Family every week. Such a reach may no longer be possible. The late 20th century may have been a temporary happy balance: mass audiences were largely reachable while remaining untouched by algorithms. 

We live in a world of splintered media. Shared cultural touchstones are irrelevant, and if they are well known, they’ve been reduced to eight-year-olds using the newest nonsensical Internet slang that seems to last a week at most. Young people’s special interests appear mostly in subcultures or niche topics.

I’ve commonly heard someone exclaim in shock that I or someone they know hasn’t heard of an artist, celebrity, or show that everyone supposedly knows about. Yet increasingly, it seems true that someone or something can be famous to a large chunk of the population, yet not famous at all to most…at the same time. Everyone’s attention is somewhere else. 

Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982) topped the charts for 37 weeks, but today songs by Sabrina Carpenter, driven by the heights of TikTok popularity, seem to vanish instantly. Jurassic Park (1993) has had a lasting impact on popular culture to this day, yet no one talks about Barbie and Oppenheimer from only a few years ago despite their then hysteria.

Most people today know who Darth Vader is, despite Star Wars being nearly fifty years old. In contrast, the main character of one of today’s best-selling franchises, Jake Sully from Avatar, I’d argue, is unknown in comparison. The list of examples goes on. The Internet has fractured the notion that shows and movies could have staying power, with consumers both split between algorithmically tailored social media and a variety of different streaming services. 

Monoculture is a sociological concept that parts of popular culture are experienced by everyone at once, whether it be on a national or global scale. This is largely based on ideas of Western pop culture, mass market incentives, and the concept of a shared cultural experience.

As this is something I have never experienced at its height, I only know its resonance based on how strong the culture of the past is within our culture. Renewed interest in old songs and movies can reflect the fact that the future feels like a scary place, and brands easily capitalize off nostalgia. Nothing new seems to stick anymore.

It’s nice that people with specific interests can learn and bond with others anywhere in the world, but are there any broad interests tying any of us together anymore? I see promotions featuring pop culture at McDonald's, but even then it’s catered, targeted, and only advertising disguised as addictive sodium and colorful entertainment.

Audience marketing is also undoubtedly more complex due to the diversification of content choices online. This fragmentation of people’s attention diminishes the importance of traditional media and favors personalized choices.

The term monoculture itself served as an agricultural term for growing one crop species at a time, before it more recently took on its media definition. It is also alternatively used to represent a rather different problem: that culture these days is becoming too uniform and similar everywhere.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think ideas being able to spread instantly is both good and bad. It’s just that the long-term effects of this have not played out, and I hardly hear anyone talking about this fascinating idea, especially when it feels like AI is about to accelerate this process even more. Perhaps the internet has indeed fragmented our attention towards entertainment and our ability to focus on the same interests. Yet in a different way; is it making all of us more the same?

For instance, someone on any continent could understand the same trending slang or trending Internet joke, and when English written content dominates over half of the written content online and therefore globally, it’s clear that the process of how languages typically diverge has changed.

Whereas new phrases and words once took years or decades to become common, they now do so within weeks or days. Traditionally, migration, geography, or other barriers have forced groups and their speech to drift apart naturally, developing different dialects, accents, pronunciation, and languages in response to isolation. 

The same way species diversity thrives in isolated places like tropical rainforests, linguistic divergence thrives with isolation. And now that the planet is wired together in cyberspace, what will become of our intellectual diversity?

Cities are losing what makes them distinct, with chain brands, tourist industries and similar architecture creating global look-alikes. People across the world shop at Dunkin Donuts, a purely economic fact but one that I can’t help but feel saddened by. 

So what about pop culture? Is it truly dead, or simply evolving? Sure, there may be no new larger-than-life movie stars, but we’ve got a plethora of micro-celebrities on a variety of social media platforms. And in a cool way, it’s good that we’re finally getting to hear more people’s voices. Voices that would have otherwise been unheard.

Short attention spans, engagement-pushing algorithms, and trend-chasing artists make our current splintered age simply confusing. Yet, the idea that anyone can make something with passion and possibly have it be seen by a lot of people without money or legalities, I think, is beautiful. 

The 20th century had style and charm -- and maybe people felt more of a collective cultural identity. But people point out that mainstream culture tended to be controlled by a select few: executives, producers, and people with similar amounts of money and backgrounds. 

So yes, we are losing the cultural distinctiveness that develops in isolation. But if hyper-specific micro-trends online and forums where anyone can talk about anything aren’t a form of diversity, I don’t know what is. It’s just unknown and new, and like anything, is complicated.

What good and what evil AI will bring to our culture, only time will tell. That’s a story for another time. For now, though, one thing is certain: pop culture is dead, and Internet culture is here.