We Still Have Pop Culture. We Just Don’t Share It

About a month ago, I started listening to The Joe Rogan Experience.

I had somehow gone its entire existence without really listening to it. I started with a few recent episodes, liked them well enough, and then decided to do something slightly unreasonable: go back to the beginning.

So lately I have been listening to episodes recorded around late 2009 and early 2010.

I was a freshman in high school then.

The strange thing is how little distance I sometimes feel between that world and this one.

Someone will mention a movie, a musician, a television show, a celebrity, some weird thing that happened in the news, and immediately I remember it. Not merely the thing itself, either. I remember talking about it.

I remember conversations in hallways, at lunch, after school, online. I remember what my friends thought. I remember jokes that came from things everyone had seen. I remember arguments over music, movies and whatever happened to be going on that week.

I hadn’t realized how much of my memory of that period was made of conversations about things.

And listening to those old episodes has made me realize something else:

I hardly have those conversations anymore.

That is not because pop culture disappeared.

There may be more culture available now than at any other point in human history. There are more movies, more television shows, more musicians, more podcasts, more writers, more videos and more things to pay attention to than anyone could consume in a lifetime.

The problem is that everyone is consuming different ones.

We still have pop culture.

We just don’t share very much of it.

When culture gave us something to talk about

I was not an especially outgoing teenager.

I was not painfully isolated either. I had friends. I got along with people. I was a little shy, a little nerdy and pretty ordinary in most of the ways that mattered.

Yet I remember conversation being remarkably easy.

Part of that was obviously being young. High school puts hundreds of people in the same building at the same time, gives them similar schedules and makes them experience many of the same events. That alone creates common ground.

But there was another layer of common ground that came from outside school.

A movie would come out and people had seen it.

A song would become popular and people knew it.

A television show would do something strange and people had an opinion about it.

A celebrity would embarrass himself and the story would make its way through the entire culture.

Even if you didn’t particularly care about one of these things, you often knew what someone was referring to.

That mattered socially in a way I did not appreciate at the time.

Culture provided subjects.

You did not have to manufacture a conversation out of nothing. You did not have to disclose something deeply personal. You did not have to perform an especially interesting version of yourself.

There was already something sitting on the table between you.

You could just point at it.

“Did you see that?”

“What did you think of that?”

“That song is terrible.”

“That song is incredible.”

“Have you heard what happened?”

And suddenly two people were talking.

This was especially useful if, like me, you were not somebody who could effortlessly walk into a room and generate social energy from thin air.

The world supplied some of it for you.

The loss of effortless common ground

This is the part I find myself missing.

Not one particular television show.

Not one particular band.

Not the clothes people wore in 2009 or the phones they carried or the websites they visited.

I miss the ease.

I miss the feeling that there was a reasonably large layer of reality that other people and I were observing together.

These days I can follow a musician closely and discover that nobody I know listens to that musician.

Someone else may have watched three seasons of a television show I have never heard of.

Another person may spend hours every week following a YouTube channel whose existence has never once crossed my screen.

Someone can be culturally omnivorous and still have surprisingly little cultural overlap with another culturally omnivorous person.

The internet did not destroy culture.

It shattered the audience into an enormous number of smaller audiences.

In many ways, that has been wonderful.

People with niche interests can find one another now in ways that would have been almost impossible twenty years ago. Someone interested in an obscure genre of electronic music or antique computers or medieval cooking can find an entire world devoted to it.

The old mass-media system was hardly idyllic. A small number of television networks, record companies, movie studios and magazines had enormous power to decide what counted as culture in the first place.

It is hard to feel nostalgic for that part.

But we may have traded something without realizing its value.

We gained depth.

We lost breadth.

The personalized world

The modern internet is extraordinarily good at finding things you personally might enjoy.

That sounds unquestionably positive.

But personalization has a strange side effect.

My internet is not your internet.

My Spotify is not your Spotify.

My YouTube homepage is not your YouTube homepage.

My social feeds may contain thousands of cultural references that never enter yours.

Even when two people are sitting next to each other, they can be inhabiting radically different informational environments.

In the old system, everyone did not watch the same things, of course. Culture was never truly universal.

But there were bottlenecks.

There were only so many television channels.

Only so many movies arrived in theaters each week.

Radio stations played the same few dozen songs over and over again.

The front page of a newspaper actually had a front.

Those bottlenecks could be frustrating. They could also create accidental commonality.

The algorithms that replaced them are better at giving individuals what they want.

They are much worse at giving groups of people the same thing.

When everything acquires a side

There is another change that feels harder to separate from all of this.

A surprising amount of present-day culture is interpreted politically.

Movies become political.

Comedians become political.

Musicians become political.

Brands become political.

Sports become political.

News was always political, obviously, but even subjects that once could remain relatively detached from ideology now seem unusually quick to acquire a partisan identity.

That changes conversation.

Talking about something in the world can feel less like examining an object together and more like stepping onto a field where everyone is expected to choose a side.

There are plenty of people willing to have those conversations.

I sometimes am too.

But they do not provide the same social function.

They contain friction before the conversation even begins.

The easy question, “Did you see that?” quietly becomes another one:

“What kind of person are you?”

And that is exhausting.

Maybe this is just adulthood

There is an obvious objection to all of this.

I was fourteen.

Of course conversation was different.

Of course high school friends had more shared experiences.

Of course adulthood scatters people into different jobs, cities, relationships and routines.

Memory is also an unreliable editor. It preserves certain afternoons in perfect detail and quietly discards hundreds of boring ones.

It would be ridiculous to assume that every difference between 2010 and today is evidence of cultural decline.

Some of what I miss is simply youth.

But I do not think all of it is.

Something measurable changed in the way media reaches us.

There was once a stronger expectation that another person had probably encountered many of the same cultural objects you had.

That expectation is weaker now.

And I think its disappearance changed ordinary conversation more than we usually acknowledge.

I don’t want to talk about myself all the time

One of the unexpected consequences is that personal life becomes one of the few subjects people reliably have in common.

How is work?

How is the family?

What did you do this weekend?

What are you working on?

There is nothing wrong with these questions.

But I sometimes find them claustrophobic.

I do not always want to talk about myself.

I want to talk about something outside myself.

I want to turn toward the world with someone else and examine it.

A movie.

A scientific discovery.

An absurd celebrity story.

A song.

A book.

Some strange event happening halfway across the planet.

Something neither person owns.

Shared culture gives conversation a third participant.

There is you.

There is me.

And there is the thing we are both looking at.

Without that third object, conversation can gradually collapse inward.

I don’t think we have to accept the loss

I do not believe the answer is to recreate the cultural world of 2010.

Nor would I particularly want to.

The modern media landscape is freer, stranger and more diverse. There are people making extraordinary things today who never would have passed through the gates of older media institutions.

Trying to restore the old monoculture would mean throwing away a lot of what the internet improved.

But perhaps we can recover some of what disappeared without rebuilding the machinery that produced it.

The difference may be that shared culture used to happen automatically.

Now we may have to create it deliberately.

Friends can decide to watch the same movie.

Someone can send an album and the other person can actually listen to it.

A group of people can follow the same writer.

People can form book clubs, movie nights, listening groups, neighborhood gatherings, small online communities.

None of these will recreate the enormous cultural overlap that television and radio once imposed.

Maybe they do not need to.

Perhaps the future is not mass culture at all.

Perhaps it is thousands of small common cultures.

Little constellations of people who have chosen to pay attention to some of the same things.

The internet is extremely good at giving each of us a private universe.

Maybe one of the next challenges is learning how to invite people into ours.

Listening backward

For now, I am still working my way through those early podcast episodes.

Every so often somebody mentions something from 2009 and a door opens.

For a few seconds I am standing in a hallway again.

Someone is talking about a band.

Someone has just seen a movie.

Something ridiculous happened on television the night before.

Everybody knows what everybody else is talking about.

And the conversation simply moves.

That may be partly nostalgia.

But nostalgia does not necessarily mean the thing being remembered was imaginary.

Sometimes it is simply the mind noticing that something valuable existed before we knew enough to value it.

I do not think shared culture is gone forever.

I think we stopped receiving it automatically.

Now we have to make some of it ourselves.