When the hubby and I watch The Voice, I’m often struck by how many artists/songs I don’t recognize. Who the hell is Dua Lipa? DJ Khaled? I have no idea, and I often feel uniformed. When I do, I remind myself that I’m well informed about other subjects, and there’s no real need for me to know all about every style or genre of music. Not only is there no need, there’s no possibility of being informed about every style or genre of music; there’s just too much of it to keep track.
And that, I think, raises questions – really deep, philosophical questions that have no easy answers but are therefore worth (perhaps even required) contemplation/consideration.
Perhaps they can all be summed up in one: How do you have *a* culture when there are not a lot of shared cultural experiences?
As one example:
When I was a kid, there were five television stations: the local ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates; a local station (that later got bought by Fox); and the local Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) affiliate. (I was in high school before HBO and Showtime showed up. It wasn’t too long after that that cable became a thing.)
What that meant was that we had few choices, and few choices meant that most people saw the same thing, especially if it was a major event; at the very least, most people were aware of what was going on with the big three networks, even if we didn’t watch them, so we could converse about the big topics and shows/events of the day with common ground.
Now, though… add Fox to the major three networks, plus CNN, MSNBC, and that’s just for news stations. There are, literally, hundreds of other cable networks (plus Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and other similar companies) producing new content (which we used to call “shows” or “programs”) every single day. That doesn’t even include independent YouTubers and bloggers and … and … and.
Where do you find common ground with hundreds
, even thousands, of sources, and you have no idea which ones anyone outside your immediate circle of friends is watching? (As an aside, a couple of Fridays ago, we invited two other couples over to dinner. During the conversation, it came out that all six of us had recently been watching British (and other similar) cozy-ish murder mystery series. How random/coincidental is that?)
I’m an American, and I believe in freedom of speech and creation, etc. In no way am I suggesting that we should do away with all of those cable channels and other sources. (Though, of course, it’s my opinion that we’d be better off without some of them.)
Still, the proliferation of “content” is a part (but only a part) of why our culture seems to be falling apart: in some senses, there is no culture anymore (when culture is defined as the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group).
Carried to a logical extreme: when a group of people have little to nothing in common, why should they care about each other? Why should they band together for common cause?
More worrying, how do they determine what common cause even is?
And what happens to a people in that state for a long time?
Questions like that keep me up at night.
