Matt Glassman

monoculture

Many social critics, notably Chuck Klosterman, have written a lot about the disappearance of the 20th century monoculture.

The basic thesis is simple: in the 20th century, limited mass media and television created a more focused, common national pop culture. TV shows had fixed times and huge audiences, which in turn created common watercooler conversations. News came from limited elite outlets which, for better or worse, created a shared mass understanding of politics. Ditto for youth culture via music and MTV. Superstars were larger than life; the hardest thing to do in 1984 was finding a way to avoid Michael Jackson and Madonna.

Modern proliferation and decentralization of digital media have shattered that. Algorithms drive individually-curated tastes; news comes from a million different sources. To a first approximation, no one (and no thing) is famous anymore. Klosterman loves to note that most episodes of Major Dad—the completely forgettable modestly-popular sticom from the 90s—had a much higher weekly viewership than Game of Thrones. And even Taylor Swift, the only superstar in my mind who has approximated 80s-level fame, is easily avoidable if you don't want to listen, see, or read about her.

It's easier than ever to find your niche and the people in it; but it's approaching impossible to feel like you are having a true, shared national experience. The NFL and the Super Bowl still duplicate it. Live sports is somewhat resistant to decentralization. But even the Super Bowl doesn't feel like the same overwhelming cultural event it once did. There's just a lot more going on that weekend, now. Or at least it feels that way.

I say all this because right now I'm particularly missing the monoculture. The following things all feel underwhelming to me right now, or felt underwhelming to me recently, I think because of the lack of the limited monoculture:

None of this is because you can't participate or enjoy these things now. It's actually the opposite—you can read and consume information about any of these things on a scale barely imaginable in 1994.

What you can't do is have a casual conversation with just any random person about them. To not be exposed to the moon landings in the late 60s or the hockey game in 1980 or the world cup in 1994 took a level of effort that was almost impossible. Now it's as easy as going about your day. Which reinforces the principle that, if you want to talk about the stuff you find cool, you should go on the internet. Rinse and repeat.

There's a somewhat different set of things, mostly political, that now suffer from a lack of neutral information. The Iran war fits in this category for me. The monoculture had its dangers for politics, with its elite gate-keeping and reporting. But the partisan media environment combined with the algorithmic online news reality made gathering information on the Iran war dizzying to the point of exhaustion for me.

American 250, I think, suffers from all of this. There's a huge variety of really cool events planned, but it just doesn't seem to be even close to the front of anyone's mind. Trump and the perceived partisanship of Freedom 250, of course, hasn't helped, and has made it easy for partisan media to reduce a lot of the celebration, especially the ones in DC, to litmus-tests about your views of politics.