The Internet Killed Mainstream Culture
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Hey Everyone đ ,
The past few weeks of Digital Native have been more specific, touching on companies innovating in commerce đ (The Transformation of Commerce), in socially-impactful sectors đ± (The Glass-Half-Full View of Technology), and in media đ„ (Innovation in Media).
This weekâs piece is more philosophical, stepping back to reflect on a broader trend rather than honing in on any particular startups. It aims to answer the questions: how did the internet kill mainstream culture, and what are the consequences?
Letâs jump inâŠ
The Internet Killed Mainstream Culture
One interesting trend over the past half-century has been the decline in awards show viewership. This decline has accelerated over the past decade:
For the past hundred years, movies, TV, and music have formed our cultural lingua franca. Awards shows were their pinnacleâa reliable water cooler topic for Monday morning at the office. But thatâs been rapidly changing.
The main reason: mainstream culture is dying.
Internet culture is now culture writ large, and internet culture is definitionally non-mainstream. Internet culture is messy and chaotic and fragmented. Internet culture movies at a torrid clip, and thumbs its nose at content catered to the cultural common denominator.
The three shows in the chart aboveâthe Oscars, the Emmys, and the Grammysâprovide a good framework for how mainstream culture is breaking down. Letâs start with the Oscars. Viewership of the Oscars is down more than 80% since its peak. Itâs not all linearâthis year, viewership was actually up 58% over last year:
But that stat is misleading: this yearâs Oscars still had the 2nd-worst viewership in history. Of course, Will Smithâs slap made headlinesâbut most people found out about it on Twitter, on Facebook, or on Instagram. Then they looked up the clip on YouTube or TikTok. Few people actually saw it live.
Part of the publicâs waning interest in the Oscars stems from the type of movies that the Academy is choosing to reward.
Once upon a time, box office hits could also be Oscar winners. In 1994, Forrest Gump was the yearâs 2nd-highest-grossing film, just edged out by The Lion King. The film won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Tom Hanks. Three years later, Titanic smashed records to become the then-highest-grossing film of all-time, topping the box office for 15 weeks. Titanic set another record at the Oscars, winning 11 statues to tie it with Ben Hur for most-ever (its 14 nominations were also a record). A record 57 million people tuned in to watch Titanic clean up on Oscar night.
And in 2003, the yearâs highest-grossing movie, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, tied Titanicâs record 11 wins. That year was the last timeâ19 years agoâthat the box office champ also took home Best Picture.
In the last 20 years, the Academy has shown a preference for lesser-seen independent films with a much smaller cultural footprint. The Artist, The Shape of Water, Nomadland. (Serious question: has anyone talked about The Artist since 2012?) This year, I was struck by how few people I know had seen CODA or The Power of the Dog. As Bloombergâs Lucas Shaw pointed out, on Oscar weekend, The Power of the Dog sat at just #9 on Netflix, one slot below a random movie called Faster from 2010.
Itâs difficult to parse out how much of the Oscars decline stems from the Academyâs decision to reward indie films, and how much stems from our own societal tastes shifting. Itâs a nuanced topic. Dennis Hopper framed it well:
But a major part of the showâs decline is that people tune in to award shows when the things theyâve consumed are nominatedâand outside of superhero movies, there are few major cultural sensations anymore. Thereâs so much content online that âgoing to the moviesâ is a dying event. Weâre all watching different stuff.
This brings us to TV (the Emmys) and to the rise of streaming. Last week I shared this chart of TV production:
In the midst of the streaming wars, weâre inundated with content. 2021âs 559 shows is the highest in history. A half-century ago, there were three TV channels and half of America watched M*A*S*H every week. Today, youâre unlikely to be watching the same show as your neighbor or coworker or barber.
The streaming release format (popularized by Netflix) further dilutes cultural impact.
An interesting case study is to compare Netflixâs Stranger Things with HBOâs Game of Thrones. Both shows were massive hits and both were viewed by roughly the same number of households. But Game of Thronesâs cultural impact was orders of magnitude larger. This came down to release strategy. Netflix dropped the entire Stranger Things season the week of the Fourth of July; by mid-July, the cultural conversation had moved on. In contrast, by releasing one episode of Thrones each week, HBO kept its show in the cultural water cooler for three months. Game of Thrones was appointment television: everyone was at the same place, at the same time, week after week. (Side note: probably for this reason, Netflix has decided to split Stranger Things Season 4 into two releases, one in May and the other in July, a strategy it just tried with Ozark.)
Mainstream television culture has been killed by 1) the sheer breadth of content, and 2) the rapid pace of streaming releases.
Finally, letâs turn to music (the Grammys). Music is also fragmenting. There are 60,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every dayâabout 22 million a year. Weâre all discovering and listening to more and more artists. Spotify hasnât refreshed this data since 2017, but the average number of artists that a listener streams per week has steadily ticked up:
My âSpotify Wrappedâ told me that in 2021, I listened to 764 (!) distinct artists.
Thereâs a beauty to this: creation has never been easier, and we can all find music more tailored to our own personal tastes. But thereâs also a downside: we lose a common language. I went to see Dua Lipa in concert last weekend. Dua Lipa is the most-streamed female artist in the world right now, with 70 million Spotify streams last month. âLevitatingâ topped Billboardâs year-end charts for 2021 as the yearâs biggest song, and just broke the record for longest-charting song by a woman in Hot 100 history. Dua Lipa has 81.5 million Instagram followers. And yet, a handful of my colleagues had never even heard of Dua Lipa. (Yes, I was as aghast as you.)
The Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys are nothing if not vehicles for the stars who power the engine of pop culture. But the ubiquity of those stars is waning.
Two years ago, I wrote in The Business of Fame that we would never again have a celebrity on the scale of Marilyn Monroe or Oprah: celebrities of those eras existed before the noise of the internet, and fame is simply too accessible now. Weâre all in our own content bubbles, and celebrity means different things to different people. To someone who watches Greyâs Anatomy, spotting Ellen Pompeo at a restaurant might be the highlight of your day (or year); to a non-viewer, itâs at best mildly cool. If youâre a fan of Dua Lipa, meeting her would be incredible; if you donât know who she is, đ€·ââïž. And a teenager might be thrilled to meet Emma Chamberlain, but their parent might not even know who Emma Chamberlain is.
The pandemic accelerated our cultureâs fragmentation: we all became more of a digital species, meaning we retreated into our own cultural silos. In my last piece of 2020, titled Weâre All Social Distancing Online, I wrote:
Iâve been thinking about 2020 as a year in technology, and Iâve been struck by its similarities to our socially-distanced physical world. When we remember 2020, weâll remember it as the year that we also became secluded and isolated online.
That excerpt emphasizes the negativity of this shift, and I paired it with this rather alarmist image:
But the breakdown of mainstream culture isnât necessarily a bad thing.
First, this is a trend thatâs been in the works for a long time. Back in 2014, Balaji Srinivasin wrote:
An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internetâvegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural location.
Re-reading Balajiâs piece, Iâm reminded of Discordâs 19 million (!) weekly active servers, +184% from 6.7 million a year ago. Each server is the living, breathing nucleus of a community (including CrossFitters, DIYers, Pinners, etc). And Iâm reminded of how Jack Conte of Patreon once framed online community: you may think your interests are nicheâmaybe only 1 in 1,000 people like the same things as youâbut with 4 billion people online, thatâs 4 million people who share your interests. On the internet, no niche is too niche.
In the eight years since Balaji wrote those words, the internet has exploded. I always think back to âan internet minuteââeverything that happens in 60 seconds online:
And newer content forms continue to expand and reinvent an internet minute. TikTokâs engagement, for instance, is now 3x that of Instagram.
A year ago, hardly anyone knew what an NFT was. Now, OpenSea has more NFTs listed on its platform than there were websites on the internet in 2010 (!).
Interestingly, the breakdown of mainstream culture shares its roots with much of the web3 movement: itâs a reaction to centralized authority. For the past century, a handful of studio executives, talent agents, and music producersâmostly in LA and New Yorkâcontrolled American culture. Now, itâs anyoneâs game. There are no rules. This is the same âdown with the gatekeepersâ attitude powering other major trends, like the rise of self-employment and the Great Resignation.
The breakdown of mainstream culture clearly has both good and bad aspects.
The fact that internet is vast, uncharted territoryâanyone can take a hold and move cultureâmeans that culture is becoming more diverse. Awards shows, meanwhile, remain stuck in the mostly-white, mostly-male media world of old. (See: #OscarsSoWhite, Adeleâs 25 beating Beyonceâs Lemonade, or The Weekndâs boycott of the Grammys.) The diversity of modern culture is unequivocally a good thing. But that comes at the cost of more fragmentation, the loss of a cohesive cultural language. And that fragmentation can be interpreted in different ways. Maybe instead of reading The New York Times, you now read Breitbart or subscribe to a Substack: that could be celebrated as more personalized, individualistic, gatekeeper-less media; or it could mean that youâve sequestered yourself in your own algorithmic echo chamber, exposed only to the people and ideas that reinforce your own worldview. Both can be true.
When I think of modern culture, I think of Neil Stephensonâs The Diamond Age. Stephenson is better known for his novel Snow Crash, which coined the term âmetaverse.â But in The Diamond Age, Stephenson introduces the idea of phyles. In the The Diamond Age, people live in phylesâcultural groups that have largely replaced nations. Phyles share values and interests, but often not locationâthey are, after all, digitally-native. As Balaji puts it, âThe future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.â Thatâs the power of internet culture. Weâre all living in digital phyles.
We see these tribes forming online. Take the TikTok comment belowâeven as TikTokâs algorithm divides us up into our own niches of culture, we feel closer and more connected than ever before. After all, in history there have never been more humans just a swipe or click or like or text or comment away.
Where is culure going? Cultural phenomena will be both momentarily larger than ever before possible (again, there are 4.5 billion people online), but the pace of culture will ensure that those highs are short-lived. Take the biggest hits of the past two falls, Squid Game and The Queenâs Gambit. Both were inescapableâ142 million Netflix accounts watched Squid Game in its first month, 67% of all accounts around the world. But after some Halloween costumes and a whole lot of sales of chess sets, the culture had moved on. Culture is both bigger and smaller than ever before, and itâs certainly faster-moving. Thereâs no such thing as a mainstreamârather, we have 4.5 billion individual universes of culture, colliding and intersecting and building on one another to redefine how we collectively think and live.
Sources & Additional Reading
We Are All Weirdos Now | Jon Evans
Software Is Reorganizing the World | Balaji Srinivasin
Curating the Internet | Alexandra Sukin
Where Hollywood and Silicon Valley Collide | Lucas Shaw
Related (and very old) Digital Native pieces:
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