The State of Pop Culture

What gives?

Many years ago, before many of you here were even born, a music review talking about pop music said that pop music is always recycling its own ideas, and that pop would eventually "eat itself".

That's basically what happened with pop culture. People who grew up on a steady diet of pop culture, and who rarely ventured beyond the shallowest end of the pop culture pool to read real books, watch real movies, or otherwise have actual life experiences, grew up to be incredibly dull, boring, talentless hacks.

And now those people are writing and producing new media.

Compounded by the growth of digital distribution and streaming, where there is now a constant hunger for new content, more content than any human could ever hope to experience, and most of which is just slop churned out for mass consumption rather than art for art's sake. The signal-to-noise ratio is worse now than it's ever been before in the entirety of human history - in far more than just entertainment.

I've been saying for decades now that the younger generations are going to grow up with almost no nostalgia and no real shared pop culture language. We're still in the earlier stages of that inevitable outcome, but the car's already speeding down the hill and the brakes have long since gone.

what's aura farming?

?

I don't know and I don't care.

Lokarin posted...

what's aura farming?

It's a thing terminally online social media assholes say because they're pretentious shits.

this looks like a decent pop culture:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/9/9c0580b7.jpg

ParanoidObsessive posted...

slop churned out for mass consumption

I'm tempted to compare Hollywood to those AI art programs that are all the rage these days.

EclairReturns posted...

I'm tempted to compare Hollywood to those AI art programs that are all the rage these days.

That's part of why I tend to laugh whenever anyone tries to criticize AI by saying AI will never have the creativity or soul that humans do.

It's like, it's not like AI can do a much worse job than the humans currently are. We've already got the soulless, derivative, nonsensical writing without the AI. Might as well just let the computers do it.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's like, it's not like AI can do a much worse job than the humans currently are. We've already got the soulless, derivative, nonsensical writing without the AI. Might as well just let the computers do it.

AI will never reach the peak "oh now it's generic chaff" that happened to Falco in 1985.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uax0UUuMtqM

If anything, that's aspirational for an AI.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I've been saying for decades now that the younger generations are going to grow up with almost no nostalgia and no real shared pop culture language. We're still in the earlier stages of that inevitable outcome, but the car's already speeding down the hill and the brakes have long since gone.

This is definitely something already happening. With so many fractured ways to consume content, we've lost the water cooler shows like Seinfeld or Friends or XYZ of yore that brought people together and virtually everyone watched. Music more or less, too. I think the last show like that was...Game of Thrones, maybe. And even then....

Agree with the noise ratio, although there has also been a perfectly steady stream of original and good shows and films. A lot of trash, yes, but this year has restored my faith in Hollywood at least a little bit. None of the good stuff tends to make much money, that said. Indeed, the Top 10 grossing films so far are all remakes/established IP, save for F1 (tbf, Sinners is just right outside at #11).

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Agree with the noise ratio, although there has also been a perfectly steady stream of original and good shows and films. A lot of trash, yes, but this year has restored my faith in Hollywood at least a little bit. None of the good stuff tends to make much money, that said

Yeah, it's not that good programming isn't being made at all, it's that it's so much harder to find amid the massive sea of mediocre or terrible content, and most of it seems to be made by smaller studios or independent filmmakers rather than larger studios with huge marketing budgets. "Hollywood" seems to be utterly broken, but even a broken clock can be right twice a day.

But because it's harder to find, and spread out across so many alternative platforms, it means any given film or show is only going to be seen by a tiny fraction of the population, which means it'll never really become part of a larger overall pop culture identity. People may talk about how good a movie like "Weapons" is, but how many people will still be talking about it 5 years from now? 10 years? 20?

It also affects nostalgia. Hollywood is currently in an "exploit nostalgia as hard as you can" phase, but how are you going to exploit a shared nostalgia in the future when shared experiences barely exist?



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

This is definitely something already happening. With so many fractured ways to consume content, we've lost the water cooler shows like Seinfeld or Friends or XYZ of yore that brought people together and virtually everyone watched. Music more or less, too. I think the last show like that was...Game of Thrones, maybe. And even then....

The interesting thing to consider is, no matter how iconic or culturally significant we tend to think of Game of Thrones being, the average viewer rating for the final season was only 12 million. Out of ~300 million people. That's like 4% of the US that actually watched it.

Now imagine you're in a room with 100 other people, and trying to find things you have in common to start a conversation. If you pick Game of Thrones, thinking it was hugely popular and surely everyone will have seen it, you're going to be in for a shock when only about 4 people out of the 100 actually have.

Water cooler talk was a thing when people only had 3-4 (or later a dozen or so) channels, so everyone was more or less watching the same things, because there wasn't much choice. You're NEVER going to see something like the M*A*S*H finale again, where 100 million people watched it. With hundreds of channels and dozens of streaming services, everyone's sort of narrowcasting their own experiences and losing any real connection to what other people are experiencing.

The same sort of thing applies for video games. No matter how many people want to talk about Ocarina of Time being the best game evar, it only sold about 7 million copies. Apart from certain rare exceptions, the most popular games ever rarely sell more than 10-15 million copies or so. A game can be incredibly popular within the gamer niche, but once you extend it to the entire population, very few games will ever have mass appeal (or mass awareness) for most people.

Hell, even news is falling prey to this sort of thing. With so many alternative news sources (all with their own biases), people's perception of news events is now being spread out across dozens of different versions of any given story (or even which stories are being told versus which are being ignored). Two people can essentially be living in two entirely different reality bubbles and never realize it. The younger generations like to talk about The Mandela Effect - but now people aren't sliding in from alternate realities where things are slightly different, everyone is living in their own pocket universe where everything is different. That's going to get worse over time, and younger people are going to live lives where they don't remember anything other than that.sort of life.

Now imagine trying to make friends or date in a world where everyone you meet seems like they came from an alternate universe where everything was different. How can you relate to someone based on shared commonalities when you have literally nothing in common?

At this point about the only shared culture we have at all that a large number of people are watching together is TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Which people tend to forget 20 minutes after watching. And which are utterly terrible.

"pop music all sucks except during the time I was growing up" -every single person

-including me

- and you

Don't lie.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Now imagine trying to make friends or date in a world where everyone you meet seems like they came from an alternate universe where everything was different. How can you relate to someone based on shared commonalities when you have literally nothing in common?

Having literally nothing in common is quite rare. At the level of minutiae, perhaps, but no matter how fragmented pop culture gets, you're still going to be able to find commonalities in broad genres. That, in turn, provides a springboard for creating new shared experiences instead of relying on ones you had before you met. If you both like horror movies but neither of you have seen any of the same horror movies as the other, that means you can just share your favourites with each other and talk about them afterwards.

Yes, gone are the days of "You like M*A*S*H? I like M*A*S*H! Let's make out," but if you actually make an effort to listen to what people like, respect and value their opinions, and offer to share experiences with them that you expect they'll enjoy instead of falling back on referencing pop culture that you can assume they're familiar with, it's not hard to find enough common interests to make friends or date.

This, incidentally, is likely a sizable part of the "male loneliness epidemic," given that the modern manfluencer sphere promotes an ideal of masculinity that explicitly discourages listening to and respecting other people's opinions and feelings. That can kind of work when you can safely assume that they've consumed and enjoyed the same media as you (or at least when it's very easy to find somebody else that has, if it doesn't work the first few times). Not so much when you can't, and finding common ground means actually trying to understand them and their interests.

koopabrosblack posted...

"pop music all sucks except during the time I was growing up" -every single person

-including me

- and you

Don't lie.

That does not include me, I hate the pop music of my youth

Naturally a topic about pop culture eventually becomes a place to criticize the modern 'lonely' men and their 'toxic' masculinity. If half the men are lonely, the flip side is that half the women are equally lonely and complaining thereof. But then watching those tiktok videos, who wants to approach those toxic women.

Amuseum posted...

Naturally a topic about pop culture eventually becomes a place to criticize the modern 'lonely' men and their 'toxic' masculinity. If half the men are lonely, the flip side is that half the women are equally lonely and complaining thereof. But then watching those tiktok videos, who wants to approach those toxic women.

That would be true if you were measuring loneliness solely in terms of romantic relationships, and heterosexual ones at that. Research shows that simply isn't true; even single women tend to have female friends (insert the entirely serious meme that single women keep women single), but lonely men tend not to have male friends as well as not having girlfriends, and homosexual men are as lonely or even more so than heterosexual men.

Music wise I think rap is as innovative as ever, rock's not doing too hot at all on a mainstream level, pop's been spinning it's tires with a lot of samplings and references, and country is somehow worse than ever.

TV is in a good spot creatively but from a viewership angle and juggling all the streaming apps, it's also more annoying than ever.

Most movie previews I see now I can't help but think who enjoys this crap.

Youtube culture and tik tok is beyond me, I'm too old for that crap.

I'm officially middle aged

willythemailboy posted...

That would be true if you were measuring loneliness solely in terms of romantic relationships, and heterosexual ones at that. Research shows that simply isn't true; even single women tend to have female friends (insert the entirely serious meme that single women keep women single), but lonely men tend not to have male friends as well as not having girlfriends, and homosexual men are as lonely or even more so than heterosexual men.

Research has also shown that men tend to rely more on romantic relationships for emotional connections than women do, which largely stems from systemic homophobia discouraging emotional closeness (even if it's platonic) between dudes. The consequence of that is that single men tend to be lonelier and less emotionally fulfilled than single women, even if they have comparable numbers of close friends. That probably also factors into why the friendzone is such a contentious issue: a lot of guys don't expect emotional closeness from non-romantic relationships, and that makes it easy to mistake a platonic emotional connection for romantic interest.

So, you know, hug your bros. You'll all feel better for it.

Amuseum posted...

Naturally a topic about pop culture eventually becomes a place to criticize the modern 'lonely' men and their 'toxic' masculinity. If half the men are lonely, the flip side is that half the women are equally lonely and complaining thereof. But then watching those tiktok videos, who wants to approach those toxic women.

Not so much a criticism as a tangential observation. That was largely idle speculation, so if you've got reason to think I'm off base to have spotted a potential connection there, I welcome your input for the sake of refining it. Getting defensive with "oh yeah? Well I bet all the women are just as lonely!" doesn't really contribute much, though, and instead smacks of protesting just a wee bit too much.

adjl posted...

Research has also shown that men tend to rely more on romantic relationships for emotional connections than women do, which largely stems from systemic homophobia discouraging emotional closeness (even if it's platonic) between dudes. The consequence of that is that single men tend to be lonelier and less emotionally fulfilled than single women, even if they have comparable numbers of close friends. That probably also factors into why the friendzone is such a contentious issue: a lot of guys don't expect emotional closeness from non-romantic relationships, and that makes it easy to mistake a platonic emotional connection for romantic interest.

So, you know, hug your bros. You'll all feel better for it.

Not so much a criticism as a tangential observation. That was largely idle speculation, so if you've got reason to think I'm off base to have spotted a potential connection there, I welcome your input for the sake of refining it. Getting defensive with "oh yeah? Well I bet all the women are just as lonely!" doesn't really contribute much, though, and instead smacks of protesting just a wee bit too much.

As a trans woman I feel like I'm well-qualified to say that- yes, women are keen on emotional intimacy with their friends and I, in general, find it easier to make friends with women now that they perceive me as a woman.
All but one of my closest friends are now women who I've met since coming out, because it turns out emotional intimacy in platonic relationships is awesome (the outlier is another trans woman I've known since before either of us came out). Men are missing out! Ya'll are worth it.

...this is also why lesbians can sometimes struggle to pick up on romantic signals. Because women are naturally emotionally intimate with each other and often enough touchy with other women platonically.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.