LogFAQs > #940700867

WhiskeyDisk posted...

the big finish would ring hollow because there wouldn't be enough time to catch up on everything in modern media.

I always love when you hear statistics like how more content is uploaded to YouTube in a single minute than any human being could watch in their entire lifetime.

Sure, most of that content is nothing you'd ever want to watch, but it really does underline just how much content IS being produced, across multiple media, that become almost overwhelming to sort through or make time for.

It's part of why I've questioned whether or not we're even going to HAVE pop culture as a concept in the future. Pop culture is essentially the shared experiences of given generations of people. Shout "And now I know!" at any 80's kid (at least ones from the US), and they're almost certainly going to come back at you with "And knowing is half the battle", because literally everyone watched GI Joe. Nearly everyone (at least of a certain age) knows about Luke's dad, or who Homer Simpson is, while a slightly older generation remembers when more people watched the MASH finale than have ever watched the Super Bowl. Since the 1950s, kids have been growing up with this shared universe of fiction, where you can make references or metacontextual jokes about movies or shows or songs and assume anyone listening will understand what you're talking about.

But if a generation of kids grow up watching radically different shows, and with some not watching TV at all and just watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft, will they really ever have media in common? If everyone is narrow-casting only the shows they want to watch, are you ever going to have a single concept or show that crosses all barriers and become a shared "language" between members of a given generational cohort? Or are we basically going to be reduced to a scenario where individuals might occasionally share one or two things in common, but there's no overriding universal constant that a majority can relate to?

And considering just how much of our media over the last 20-30 years has relied heavily on pop culture references, how would a lack of pop culture reshape things?

Ironically, we can't even assume that shared experience would have to default back to news/global events/historical moments, because the glut of media means that the average person isn't even seeing the world in the same way - narrow-casting news sources that cater to people's pre-existing biases present world events in entirely different ways (assuming they bother to report them at all). Is someone who gets their news exclusively from MSNBC even living in the same world as someone who only watches Fox News? And will they remember events the same way, allowing them to somehow integrate those world-views 20 years later?

It's probably doomsaying to imagine a world where every human is effectively culturally isolated from everyone else, and social interaction becomes almost entirely digitally-dependent and superficially shallow at best, but sometimes the implications of technology can be kind of worrisome.

Now I'm starting to wonder if I should have paid more attention in college, in my class about the sociological aspects of information technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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