Wednesday, January 01, 2020

Scattered and Shattered

Happy New Year  /  Happy New Decade

Here's a piece I did for last weekend's Guardian Guide looking back at the last decade's popular culture - music and TV -  and focused on how streaming is eroding the idea of a mainstream, as we all follow on our own increasingly individualized streams that thread through the flood of content. The result is not so much the disintegration of the Monoculture as the de-synchronization of the Monotemporality: a swarm of micro-publics all tied to their own timeline.

"Scattered and Shattered" was my original headline.

Here's some further thoughts from Julia Alexander at Medium and a different view (by Soraya Roberts, from earlier in the year) which detects greater homogenization than ever: a narrowing  oligopoly dominating the attention economy and literally concentrating power, in the sense of converging the concentration of masses of people.