I'm not trying to crap on everybody's parade by pointing out how fragmented our pop culture society as a whole is becoming. The same would be true for your "ignorant friend" who has no idea who Sutton Foster is. I guarantee you whatever pop-world he's living in includes a lot of people we've never heard of. He might be just as surprised (or horrified or angered or depressed?) to learn that you don't know who his favorite (blah-blah) is.
I'm fascinated by this new trend of pop-culture diversity. Maybe I explained it too quickly before, but just look at the music industry. We all used to buy albums (yes, records) or singles that a record label decided to release. If you weren't signed by a record company, there was no way you were going to reach a wide audience with your music. And the music was played on a limited number of radio stations reachable on your AM or FM dial. That was it. So if a record became a hit, most everybody who listened to "current" music knew about it.
Same thing on TV with the season finale of M*A*S*H, which remains the most-watched TV series episode ever, and it aired in 1983. (Only Super Bowl XLIV has beaten its ratings for the single most-watched program of any kind ever.) Why? True, it was a popular show that ran for years, but when this M*A*S*H episode aired, it wasn't competing with major cable stations (we had cable by then, but with only dozen channels max, then). Most people were limited to the 3 networks, PBS, and a few local channels. That's it. There was no Internet, no home video to speak of (VHS was just beginning to catch on). So that's how you got such a huge viewership. It's not possible to do that today.
Even with all the "Gleeks" out there, last year's season finale reached 11 million viewers. Great! This country now has 311 million people in it. That's 3.5 percent of the total population who watched Glee.
And here's an even bigger trend. I know more people now who are canceling their cable, and some who have gotten rid of their TVs. They don't watch them enough anymore. They get info and entertainment when they want, and watch what they want, on the Internet. That's it.
For movies, it's the same thing. Take Gone With the Wind. No movie will ever sell that many tickets in its first run (not dollars but tickets) because back then, there was no TV, no home video release of movies. You either saw it in the theatre or you didn't see it at all. And you couldn't stay home and watch TV, either. That's why, as big a hit as Avatar is, it's dwarfed by the numbers of people who saw Gone With the Wind. More than twice as many, and the country's population was about half of what it is now.
Books can now be self-published and released via many outlets on the Internet. Blogs and message boards have taken the place of magazines and newspapers, to a large degree. Independent musicians can find and cultivate audiences without having a record label.
All of that is eating into the collective "pop culture," which is why there really is no singular pop culture anymore. It's all made up of niche audiences.
That's also why I find less ignorance in someone saying "who is that?" than I do in someone saying "I can't believe you don't know who that is!" It's the latter that shows they don't have their finger on the current shift in trends, not the former.
"Jaws is the Citizen Kane of movies."
blocked: logan2, Diamonds3, Hamilton22
Updated On: 9/10/11 at 01:43 PM
