LogFAQs > #906532291

Zeus posted...

Even without an increasing number of options, popular movies, tv shows, etc, still stand out and social media has kinda picked up the cultural slack.

Not really. For all that there's a perception that everyone is plugged in and constantly, there's still tons of people who aren't really all that overly engaged in social media as a whole. Or who are spread out across dozens of different social media sites with different cultures and different focuses and different shared experiences.

Even as a simple example, Reddit is a very different place than Twitter, which is different from Facebook, which is different from 4chan. Even here on GameFAQs, there are major differences between PotD, CE, RI, and various gameboards - and it's easy to stick to just one of them while never interacting with anyone on any of the others.

And even for people who ARE engaged in the exact same social media experience (for example, let's say Twitter), you can spend the entirety of your life never interacting with tons of people, never experiencing whatever content they're consuming or memes they're passing around, or having much of a shared experience with your entire generational cohort. Sure, SOME of your peers are going to have shared experiences, but more likely, you'll have less and less in common with everyone, at least in the sort of ways that build pop culture as a phenomenon (and which fuel in-jokes and references in future media).

If anything, this might be part of what's behind the growth of online communities over the last decade or so, where fans of specific content wind up hanging out in forums/chats dedicated to that content, or going so far as to have real world conventions or meet-ups - the only way to have someone in your life to talk about specific content with is to go out of your way to find people who share interest in that content and trying to relate to them via that lens, rather than simply interacting with people in your life and trying to find shared experiences to compare.

Also keep in mind that the Internet tends to give an illusion of popularity via the artificial "loudness" of voices. Even the most popular of media that constantly gets praised (giving the impression that literally everyone is watching it) rarely pulls ratings beyond a fraction of the greater whole. Game of Thrones? Around 10 million viewers, tops. Breaking Bad? Never drew more than 2 million until its final season, once the hype got so huge that people tuned in more to be part of a "phenomenon" than to actually watch the show. And most other "iconic" shows are way less than that.


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