I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a global sync in topics and experiences.
I’d argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago.
Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing.
To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the same global reality going from one headline to the next every week.
The whole world was talking about tariffs? Nope. They were talking whatever they saw on their personalised feed.
Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
First time I hear of these. I now wish I had not looked them up (I did not think it would be so literal).
(I also now realise that I cannot even remember how Taylor Swift sounds like, despite hearing about her quite frequently...)
When I was young you couldn't NOT know the song "semi-charmed life" by third eye blind, or 50 other songs. Nowadays idk if that's the case. Then again, I'm not sure how much would be lost if my whole middle school didn't know the song "shake that Laffy taffy".
But everyone knows Britney Spears, even if you were never in her target demographic. This sort of global fame now requires so much more to reach because of how many are really locked into hyper personalized online experiences. I used to be able to reference the latest big movie or show and people would know, now that’s mostly turned into an explanation that the movie or show even came out and exists.
There's still enormously mainstream culture. Even more enormous in the fat tail than before.
There's just also a shocking depth in the mid tail now too.
The problem with movies is that Hollywood killed itself and tech helped. Movies and TV just suck now, for the most part.
Music, fashion, and visual culture are still alive and well.
I challenge anyone from the '80s not to know of a few songs by Madonna or Michael Jackson.
Taylor is huge with some fans and completely unknown to her not-fans and there seem to be a steel transition between the two states.
This is unheard of for children to say this. If you mean adults, there were plenty of adults in the 80s that didn’t know Madonna songs, and even Michael Jackson
Not just the Internet. Before cable and satellite TV, even. Similar to Muhammad Ali in that sense - a globally renowned icon, regardless of cultural or languge barriers. In the west, there is the idea of a rivalry between Michael Jackson and Prince, but globally, there was only one King of Pop.
Taylor Swift has mind-boggling levels of fandom in the Anglosphere (even if it is largely limited to women), but her music is pretty straightforward, there are other artists like her who would be considered interchangeable with her given enough publicity. But the full package of Michael Jackson was groundbreaking and inimitable: the musical production, the dance moves, the songwriting and the music videos.
You probably think this because you were a child or young adult at the height of her fame.
My parents, who were middle aged at the time, certainly don't know who Brittney Spears is. They may have heard of her, but they couldn't recognize her or name any of her songs.
What you’re describing is an echo chamber. Which is what most sites optimize to produce (when optimizing for engagement and). I switch between bsky where it frequently feels that way “everyone is talking about Y” and mastodon where the chronological timeline makes it clear that a lot of people might be talking about it, but they’re also talking about other things.
I feel that one of the most broken things about our current reality (with so many social sites) is that it feels so singular and shared, but turns out that’s not the case at all. My partner and I have started to use the phrase “my internet” to refer to the general vibe we are taking in as in “is your internet talking about scandal Z?” I’m frequently surprised stuff that totally flys under their radar (and vice versa).
Consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're going to get coffee with either a random person in your neighborhood, or a random HN user. Which conversation will have more shared topics of interest?
This is the "global village" which was prophesied in the 1960s. It won't go away until interstellar colonization creates communication delays and a new era of cultural fragmentation.
... I mean, that's because it's a global economic crisis. In the early 70s, the entire world was talking about the oil crisis, another induced economic shock. Late noughties? The Great Financial Crisis. That sort of thing is _always_ going to be news everywhere.
Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all. Because I don't want participate in the online discussion having seen less than everyone else.
I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far more often than whole seasons at once.
I didn't mind what Andor did as much though for season 2 releasing 3 episodes at a time. If it had just been 1 episode at a time I probably wouldn't have seen it until a year or two from now after all discussion was dead.
Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to enjoying things alone.
This might be pedantic, but the sequel was remastered and was released for Windows in the first week of April 2025.
In the context of the PC versions of the original game, it has been remastered and remade, in that the PC version development started after the release of the original remaster of the console version for PS5, which was itself a remake of the PS4 remastered version of the original PS3 version.
I think the original comparison to Oblivion was fair and accurate.
Never seen it. Not even sure what it's about.
This isn't an attack on you - just a further point towards a split world. Something can be huge with one group and barely heard about elsewhere.
> The last of us
Did you just assume their gender?
The zombies are just a backdrop, the real story is focused on just two people, and it’s really heavily centred on their relationship and personal choices.
Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.
But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.
This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.
Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.
Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.
As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.
Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).
When people say "literally 1984" they don't mean an amorphous story about an inescapable dystopia, they mean very specific ideas Orwell packaged in a story. A large part of what makes Breaking Bad compelling is the endless stream of ethical choices and their consequences in the eyes of the authors. These things are thought-provoking when consuming the story, and can be further digested by discussing them with others who experienced the same story.
Outside of dedicated assignments for book clubs and schooling, this has always been the case for literature discussions.
When streaming became the norm, that dynamic was destroyed. We lurched back to private media consumption (for better or worse). There is no shared cultural narrative to tune into at 8:00 each night. There's millions of disparate voices, screaming into the void 24/7. More freedom and diversity for sure, but nothing coherent you can point to as a culture.
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
As someone who is still listening to today’s pop acts and whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop, Afrobeats, etc. and I don’t have an issue finding people who like that music in person.
We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.
Talk to people, ask them about it, introduce them to new music and movies, listen to these songs together, or watch the movie together. That is what I do with my girlfriend. She does not have the same taste in music at all as I do. There is an overlap, since I like songs from classical to rock, but yeah.
I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It’s somewhat useful to know the names of the shows that play music you like..
> expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things
For a long time I followed the Peel sessions (1967 - 2004) which was BBC DJ / Commonwealth new music and industry audience sized level of shared curation experience.
That was richer in information and breadth and more niche an experience than the larger broader scale appeal of the UK's Top of the Pops, Australia's Countdown, the USofA's later MTV curated new music offerings.
Curated or not, now or in the 1960's, 70's, later there is and has always been a sizable amount of industry capture and strong influence in bringing artist's to audiences / markets.
they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views
seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like
its like having different Trends that live on bubble
Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is no shared cultural experience by design.
A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it.
Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at all times, but it's engagement with the software, not engagement with peers.
You just disagreed with yourself, the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia
if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is because original post mention that most people on his hometown aware of song that got played, not every hometown on america have same experience
> the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia ... if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is
This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for shared cultural experience to me, but I don't really know because I'm quite distant from that kind of connection anyway.
no no no, you are not understand, this is the new normal
gone long time a way for you to meet and socialize in your local community. this is the new way
You just miss old times
We opine the enshittification of social media platforms, but seem to largely ignore the enshittification of our in-person social norms and culture by those same platforms.
One of the reasons you have to get people in young (to any product) is so that they forget or just don't even realise/consider what life is could be like without it.
they can stick to old way but we know its not going to happen since its inconvenience
it is what it is
It's already been pointed out in the comments on this article that we went from individual disconnected experiences, to mostly a shared collective experience via radio and TV and lately we went back to individual connected experiences.
He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.
On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to.
They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music.
There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip.
The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.
No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste)
I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/
If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.
I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.
I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.
I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.
So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record labels.
That doesn’t change the shared cultural experience. Decades had “sounds”, disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone heard it. Today there’s no shared cultural zeitgeist. You might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren’t local.
A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
—⁂—
¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.
² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³
³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes — people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved. (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is more reasonable.)
Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts. Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the human concepts diligence and foresight can have different cultural tones.
"A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"
Probably the best example of that is John 3:16, the best-known verse in the entire Bible: almost everyone understands it incorrectly, and the significant majority of current translations have knowingly rendered it incorrectly. KJV: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, &c.”. Trouble is, you can read that English word “so” in two main and quite different senses:
1. Thus, in this way. “For this is how God loved the world: he gave⸺” This is the sense the KJV meant. The “, that” would become just “: ” in modern English.
2. To a significant extent, of high magnitude. “For because of God’s exceeding love, he gave⸺” This is how modern readers will almost always read the sentence, even if the comma before the word “that” then doesn’t really fit.
The first sense is unambiguously the correct meaning of the Greek word Οὕτως, by itself and in that context, and I imagine it is how people read the KJV four hundred years ago. But the English language has shifted.
As far as I can tell, newer translations don’t tend to want to invite trouble (look at all the kerfuffle over the RSV’s rendition of Isaiah 7:14!) and so decide to keep the traditional English interpretation. Sure, it’s not quite what the text actually says, but what it means isn’t wrong, and there’s not a huge gap between “this is how God showed his love⸺” and “God’s love was so extreme that⸺” in reality.
And so they end up mostly going for something like “For God so loved the world that he gave⸺” (a mite worse in my opinion: the removal of the comma precludes the first sense). Some go all in on being wrong with “For God loved the world so much that he gave⸺”.
I’m genuinely surprised at how few have insisted on translating it correctly, given how widely I understand the problem is understood among translators. In <https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/jn3.16>: CSB, GW, HCSB, ISV, LEB, MOUNCE, NOG, NET, NLT, VOICE. MSG is perhaps the most interesting, artfully blending the two senses.
I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.
Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.
When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.
It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.
The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
And, I do think even for me personally that mediocre content today is much better than the mediocre content of the past. The average is higher even if the peaks are not (and those peaks are probably overestimated due to survivorship bias).
Tldr, there used to be a lot of crap and we forgot about it.
I don't think there's any comparison. The parents could point at some mass production and decide it wasn't to their taste, but ultimately they lived in the same world. Our kids are watching amateur productions they find on YouTube. You can tell the production quality is lower from things like what the images look like, terrible planning, bad sound, and so on.
I hear what you're saying. If you are sure there's no parallel here, that is your right to feel that way.
Schools don't have bullies?
That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.
I've concluded the opposite -- that we are in the midst of a cultural homogenization the likes of which has not been seen before. "Kids" these days seem to follow the same influencers, listen to the same podcasts, etc. They can even reference an exact short/TikTok meme, that has no name, but has been "making the rounds". Also, this transcends borders. Kids in the US have more in common with kids in southern Italy than ever before.
You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content.
The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups.
This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.
What conclusions did your research find?
I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.
I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.
What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...
There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.
In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.
All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)
It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.
* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.
Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".
It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist.
Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists.
But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.
Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.