LogFAQs > #906532286

Zeus posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And the entire idea of shared pop culture is slowly becoming obsolete, because the children of today are going to grow up in a world where most people HAVEN'T watched the same things or played the same games as everyone else.

Which is a strange observation, since I *thought* you had previously argued that movie theaters were becoming increasingly less diverse which *should* be supporting a shared pop culture.

I don't recall saying anything specifically along those lines, but if I did, I'd argue that for all that the modern cinema is becoming more homogeneous (in the sense that blockbusters are becoming the norm and there are people who only see 1-2 movies a year so they just stick with Marvel movies or one or two other major franchises), there's still a metric shitton of people who simply don't see those movies, and will lack the capacity to wax nostalgic about them 20 years from now (and that's not even getting into arguments about a lot of modern media being inherently unmemorable, and thus not even inspiring personal nostalgia in the individual, let alone culturally - I watch tons of stuff on a regular basis I'll probably barely remember a month from now).

When there were only three TV channels, pretty much everyone was aware of the given hit show of a specific period, even if they didn't really like it themselves. Even after cable came along and we all had 36 channels, there was still a shared spectrum of experience (ie, 80's kids had a limited palette of shows they could watch, and almost all of us watched Transformers and GI Joe).

Now we're in a world with hundreds of cable channels, dozens of streaming services, and billions of Internet videos. People effectively exist within their own personal entertainment bubbles, and while it might overlap with other people from time-to-time, there really aren't all that many "universal" shows or experiences that everyone within a certain age group share.

Even anecdotally, I can easily say that about 99% of what I watch online on a regular basis means almost nothing to my best friend, who watches almost none of it. And even where we overlap on the 1% or so, most of our other mutual friends would be completely clueless about it. Meanwhile, my friend watches shows on Amazon Prime (which I don't have) and Netflix (which I don't have), while I have channels on FiOS that he doesn't have on Optimum. I go to movies that he doesn't because he has kids - he watches sports that I don't because I generally loathe sports. And when I choose to go to websites or social media that reinforce my existing interests, they are entirely different places from where he chooses to go, and we have almost no interaction or overlap in social media as a whole.

While we still have common ground from stuff we watched in the 80s and 90s, more recent times are a huge cultural divide. And kids today are growing up with that vast gulf but without the prior connections to ground them. Yes, they WILL occasionally have things in common with some of their peers, but there likely won't be massive things that they share in common with most of their peers simultaneously.


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