r/BeardLovers • u/wheezywaiter • 3d ago
Is there really a "death of monoculture" happening right now?
People keep talking about the “death of monoculture”. An argument that, because of the fragmentation of the ways we get our media, there are fewer and fewer experiences we all share.
Is that true?
Thinking about my own experience, it immediately seems true. I miss the shared “watercooler” moments of TV shows like Seinfeld, even though I never actually shared Seinfeld moments around a watercooler and would’ve actually had less opportunity to share anything due to lack of social media.
Which raises the question: how do we know anyone shared any of this? We were just told it was shared by the very thing we got it from, the TV.
So did the TV just give us the perception that there was a monoculture because we had less access to each other?
Are we just experiencing MORE culture because there’s so much opportunity to? On the other hand, there seems to be a “death of third spaces” where we could all interact with each other in person, like the bowling alley or whatever. And one of the drivers of the “death of third spaces” argument is that young people aren’t going to the bar to get slammed, or blotto, or blitzed, or smashed, or taking a bit of grandpa’s cold medicine, or however you wanna say it.
But again, we’re interacting MORE THAN EVER in our online spaces.
AND there are still large shared cultural moments like recent blockbusters, the new Spider-Man, The Odyssey, Toy Story 5, to name a few.
It does appear that TV is much more fragmented and perhaps the biggest change from my 90s prime. But maybe that’s fine? It's just TV.
We also seem to be discussing politics a LOT more as a culture. Maybe that’s due to having more access to diverse news sources. Or maybe it's due to having fewer common dumb TV shows to talk about, so we gotta talk about something. OR because there's just more opportunity to have your voice heard.
Anyway, maybe we still have a “monoculture”, but it just looks different?
I might make a video about this, so I decided to write this up and ask you for your thoughts.
