Longer Version/Shorter Version

I still can't fathom why Slate doesn't make direct linking to individual Kausfiles (though in this case you can) post easier, but that's not what this post is about, Mickey highlights some interesting thoughts around the 'death' of shared culture

Longer Version:

Everybody's talking about how there's nothing everybody talks about! Bob Wright and I discuss, somewhat inconclusively, the issue of whether the Webbish "long tail" phenomenon will undesirably reduce the sphere of shared culture. E-mailer C. Friedersdorf says it won't

... because even though there are fewer people watching Jay Leno every night, it's now much easier to communicate with all the people who are watching.

When Bob and Mickey were growing up, you went to school if you wanted to talk about the Ed Sullivan Show and hoped your classmates would be talking about it.

Today if you watch even a niche Bravo reality tv show -- say Top Chef or Project Runway -- you go to Technorati an hour after the show ends and find hundreds of people, far more than attend your classes or work in your office, who are talking about that night's show.

One more point:

if the obscure episode of Project Runway happened to include a defining cultural moment -- let's say Heidi Klum's dress slipped off -- someone would post it on YouTube, and people would send it to one another on e-mail, etc.

So years ago, common culture required that everyone be watching something at once. Now the Web allows things that would become defining cultural moments but for an audience to attract that audience after the fact.

How many people say that World Cup head butt live? How many saw it on SportsCenter, on an Internet video clip, etc. later on?

That last, boldfaced argument seems powerful. ... P.S.: Isn't the ubiquitous Web discussion of Chris Anderson's Long Tail book itself a small refutation of the common-culture-is-dead thesis? ... Update: Here's Anderson himself declaring that "hits aren't dead"--which would seem to save the sphere of shared culture. Whew! ... 6:52 P.M.

Shorter Version:

The Internet, It's the Watercooler for Freaks and Geeks!

Longer Version of My Shorter Version:

I mean freaks and geeks in the kindest, most inclusive way. Also, the monoculture of the past wasn't ever as mono as it seemed from films and TV. The multiplicity of choices that have allowed for the greater atomization of culture has been a good thing. The ease with which those separate, and very individual, 'atoms' of folks with a wide variety of social and cultural interest can now communicate over both time and distance means everyone becomes their own record executive, their own TV executive, their own film mogul (books have already been heavily atomized since the wide availability of paperbacks). On top of that, each one of those people can serve as guide to their temple of likes and serve as messenger for their obscure niche artist/product/passtime of veneration. Everyone is an otaku regarding something, and now many of those folks share their geek love through blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

Ain't geek love grand?

(and as far as Zidane, I blogged it, practically as it happened, and I still don't like Soccer)