Internet Overload: Our Streaming Way of Life
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Broadcast media created a way of life: the mass culture that my parents were raised in. It defined a way of life for most Baby Boomers. It made many of them into middle-class collectors — of records, then CDs, of VHS tapes and DVDs. And this culture outlived them into my own childhood. It’s the culture that made legends out of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and then made Oscar-bait movies about them as the Boomers got older. It was a mass culture in which the Oscars mattered in some way.
The Oscars made sense because people needed entertainment, so they went to the movies and had to select from what was available right then and there. Mass culture was something Americans experienced collectively, and they could render collective judgments about it. This broadcast culture made the Top 40 on radio matter. And even the Grammys and Emmys seemed as though they could tell you something about the mood of the time. Often enough, what they told you was that Americans were nostalgic for some earlier period of broadcast culture. Forrest Gump was 1990s nostalgia for all the decades that came before the Nineties.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which didn’t win Best Picture, captured this sense of collective experience of American mass culture more than almost any recent American film. The lead character has to make an adjustment from pompadours to mutton chops. And the effervescence of the 1960s is about to be cut to pieces by the other side of social revolution, the explosion of violent crime, drug use, and political millenarianism.
This culture began to break down when I was about to inherit it. The household in which I was a teenager subscribed to Entertainment Weekly in order to keep up with the CDs, movies, and even novels that were worth talking about. Sometime in the late 1990s, I added Blender magazine to our list. The release of the iPod in October 2001 may’ve been the swan song of this culture. The iPod initially promised that you could take your entire CD collection with you. The premise was that you still collected, maintained, and curated your own personal collection of music.
But, quite quickly, and then all at once, the Internet began tearing broadcast culture limb from limb. First the Internet destroyed the traditional tastemakers at places such as Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, and Blender. These were replaced either by far more obsessive publications dedicated to smaller subgenres of music, or by fanzines themselves. The movies business has largely been taken over by the sprawling fan culture growing from Comic-con.
As for the content itself, the mass culture of the United States has been replaced with basically everything. Music-streaming services aim to carry all music ever recorded. They employ a few tastemakers to curate occasional lists. But on the whole, you’re left to explore on your own. Since the advent of iTunes and later Spotify, no artist or scene has had the power to move popular culture the way that grunge and gangster rap shifted their respective genres and the radio industry when I was a kid.
The segmentation came for television, too. The proliferation of prestige TV across several networks created a split audience. People who watched Mad Man weren’t the same people who watched Two and a Half Men. The most important show, according to critics’ reviews, and the most important show in terms of profit and ratings, hardly belong to the same culture. The same split applies to movies now: There is no attempt to build critical acclaim for financially successful movies, or to make critically acclaimed movies commercially viable.
You may think, So what? American mass culture had its time. Helen Andrews argues in her book Boomers that a single generation, through its embrace of Hollywood and Nashville, has practically obliterated the importance of folk culture and high culture alike.
But I wonder whether the breakdown of mass culture is connected to other breakdowns in our society. The Top 40 and the Oscars don’t mean anything to a broad American public anymore. Neither is there a transcendent Evangelical preacher like Billy Graham; in his place, there is a multitude of scenesters. Religion is something to look up on Reddit or Twitter, and everything is available to you all at once, with all the urgent and demanding enthusiasm of another fan scene. Become a 14th-century traditional Catholic, or a bisexual priestess. Nor is there anything like a traditional dating pool or dating conventions; we have apps for that, digital menus that present endless options but can’t promise that any one of them will matter a week from now.
The mass culture created by broadcast was shallow and often cynical and exploitative. But it held your hand and gave you a few (but not too many) choices. It gave you something to talk about. The new culture of streaming across the Internet gives you everything and invites you to make your own way. It’s no wonder so many people are lost and lonely in it.
