LogFAQs > #906615826

Zeus posted...

However, it's also because children are more group-centric than adults.

I agree. But peer groups don't necessarily span millions and millions of people.

If anything, what you're pointing out would suggest that in the future, we may have thousands upon thousands of smaller pop culture nuclei that overlap and interact occasionally, but which are mostly self-contained.

In the same way my nostalgic stories of ridiculous things that happened in my high school that everybody knew about and still remember (ie, the sort of stories that get brought up at high school reunions) mean absolutely nothing to anyone in this topic (or to anyone in general outside of the 300 or so people I went to school with), the content that smaller peer groups latch onto as kids won't necessarily overlap with the content other smaller peer groups latch onto halfway across a continent.



Zeus posted...

And, in general, there's *always* been choice. Even the major fads from earlier decades had lots of competitors, but that didn't stop the hits from being hits.

Yes, there's always been choice.

But there's never been as MUCH choice as is available today. And odds are, there'll be even more in the future.



Zeus posted...

And in the 50s and 60s, some homes didn't own a tv.

True. And it's very telling that the shared pop culture experience didn't really start to incorporate TV (as opposed to radio or cinema) until a significant majority of the population DID have TV. TV as pop culture is something that really didn't peak until the late 50s/60s, with the 70s -90s being the major peak period so far.



Zeus posted...

The "dozens of different social media sites" argument is a little insincere because there are only a handful at any given moment that are truly relevant.

Ehh. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are all major communities. Sites like Tumblr serve as lesser communities, and there are people who spend almost all of their online interaction time in places like YouTube comments or Twitch chat. So you're already fracturing the online social network to some degree. People who aren't online (at least in the social sense) or who gravitate to smaller sites (like GameFAQs) only split it even more.

And like I said, even if everyone in the world was on Twitter, it wouldn't mean much, because the nature of Twitter means that people split off into smaller subgroups and communities without any specific connection to the overarching whole. Things like Gangnam Style going massively viral are the exception, not the norm.



Zeus posted...

Trending features tend to give exposure to those things even if you aren't consuming the same actual content. There's countless entertainment I only learned about via Youtube, etc.

Yes, which itself sort of supports what I'm saying. You're consuming content you might have otherwise missed, which plenty of other people almost certainly did miss, and which may never reach a wider audience. And the time you spent watching it was time spent NOT watching something else, which might be the thing I was watching, or the thing Wave was watching, and so on.

And trending lists only really help create a shared culture if people are already on the same site you are to see the same things trending. And if they're willing to check out those things, rather than dismiss them based on a 3-second glance at a thumbnail. And if they even remember watching it a week later, because they never developed any meaningful connection to the content. And so on.


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