POP CULTURE EATS ITSELF

Popular culture, with its assumptions of a mass audience, once provided at least the illusion of common ground. Its foundation was a large but essentially knowable range of movies, music, TV shows, and fads that most people were assumed to be familiar with.

But that foundation is buckling under the sheer weight of all the things that now qualify as pop culture -- and all the new technologies that deliver them to finely calibrated consumer niches. Today the national water cooler bubbles with competing monologues rather than inclusive dialogues.

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