Increased Choice In Entertainment Means We’ve Lost Our Cultural Depth
No longer can you reference last night’s TV show with your friends— chances are, they were watching something else
Think back to life in the 80s and 90s.
You’d come to school or work each day and often talk about last night’s episode of Seinfeld, the newest songs on the music charts, guests on the local radio shows, or the article in the paper this morning. You may re-enact a joke or two and have a few laughs along the way.
Given you only had 3–5 TV local stations, a couple of major radio stations, and one major local paper — chances were pretty high that your friends and colleagues consumed the same content.
This narrow set of entertainment options for everyone to while away the hours led to a collective subconscious.
This meant who was alive at that time and place had a shared set of memories and experiences.
Ask any Australian who was around in 1990s and they’ll immediately recognise the following references:
- Not happy Jan (Yellow Pages advert)
- Which bank? (The Commonwealth bank)
- Never Eat Soggy Wheetbix as a way of navigating when you don’t have a compass handy
- Dollarmites (school banking account)
You too would have your own set of instantly recognisable references that resonated with those in whatever town around the world you lived in at that time.
This set of shared experiences built cultural depth. For better or for worse — those days are now gone.
Asking your colleagues or schoolyard friends if they caught last night’s episode of some show will likely result in the negative.
We live in a world with dozens of TV channels, not to mention on-demand programming via Netflix and the like.
Similarly — we now have way more options than just TV and radio to while away the hours.
We have video games, social media (itself fragmented into several different platforms), access to newspapers and non-newspaper written content from around the world, as well as a plethora of other distractions.
This fragmentation of entertainment options means that we do not build up as much of a shared collective subconscious.
Chances are — you and your neighbour/workmate/friend are living very different lives in very different informational and entertainment bubbles.
It is not a bad thing necessarily. People are engaging with content that is of greater interest to them and engaging with others more globally.
This comes at a cost, however.
You can’t reference a Monty Python joke in conversation anymore — as it would be lost on your audience (unless they watched it some decades ago).
The closest thing we have these days that you could do is reference an internet meme, which only do the rounds for a short period of time.
The above has resulted in an erosion of cultural depth in our societies. Our shared experiences are becoming fewer and farther between.
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