The Social Subtext of Popular Culture Exchange and Autism
Popular Culture Exchange is real. And it impacts social situations.
I have always felt like I should have been born in a different era. No, really.
I listened to Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, and even Frank Sinatra in elementary school. This was during the early to late 1980s.
I listen to all kinds of music today, but my cutoff seems to be around 1988.
The same is true with television shows. In the 1980s, I was watching some current television. But some of my favorites were Beat the Clock, Dennis the Menace, Lassie, and Loony Tunes among others.
My cultural illiteracy extends into the area of sports. While I am a devoted tennis fan who will tell you more than you want to know about a tournament happening in the world, I honestly couldn’t care less who is playing in the Super Bowl, World Series, or the Big 10 or Pac 12 (what’s the difference, other than one is 10 and the other is 12?). Please don’t answer that question in parentheses. I don’t care.
Oh, I have my interests, alright — plenty of them. I love jazz, blues, rock music from a particular era, soul music, the news (a special interest that started around 2012), classical music, criminal justice reform, tennis, the interstate highway system, romantic poets of the 1800s, religion’s impact on society, the history of different eras, philosophy, psychology, The Great American Songbook, politics and actually many other interests beyond the scope of this piece. But do I know who won the University of Michigan versus Ohio State game (whenever it was played)? Not a clue. I know I should know, but I don’t.
Popular Culture Exchange
When people engage in small talk, aside from the weather, one of the first reservoirs of certainty people seem to bank on that makes for a good conversation is converging both minds on popular culture. For the lack of a better phrase, I will call this phenomenon “popular culture exchange.” It is not unlike cultural convergence in that the information being exchanged between the parties is almost universalized in scope. As Americans with iPhones and access to all of the content worldwide that is memeified, musically popular, or potent in the sports world, people have ubiquitous frames of reference. Almost everyone knows what Festivus or the Soup Nazi is, regardless of whether or not they have seen those Seinfeld episodes. Most people would see the term “flux capacitor” as relating to time travel. In popular culture exchange, one can bring up a topic with near certainty that the other person will acknowledge this as a familiar reference point and have something to say about it. It’s like social cohesive glue that works for the 99.5%. If one couldn’t participate in popular culture exchange, it would be like someone in 1983 and 1984 not knowing about the Michael Jackson album Thriller. If an article starts with the sentence…” Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years, you probably are aware of x y or z…” and you don’t know much about x y or z, you would be ineligible for popular culture exchange with other people on that subject.
This is a significant source of anxiety for me in social situations. But the problem isn’t that I am not a pop culture fan. It’s that most of the pop culture I like comes from a different era, and the pop culture of today that I do like is quite specialized. Therefore, my idea of a good conversation about pop culture versus James Q. Normal’s idea will probably differ significantly.
A few years ago, a friend came from out of town to stay with me for a couple of days. He could not believe I had never heard of Black Mirror or Rick and Morty (since then, I have become a big fan of Black Mirror because it relates to a special interest of mine, dystopian societies). But this same issue extends to the Thanksgiving table while the gang is discussing certain Netflix shows that everyone has seen, or the college football game playing on TV, or the latest escapades (or lack thereof) of the Kardashians.
So I have a choice each day. I can either sacrifice my deep special interests to become a jack-of-all-trades regarding the pop culture references I should know about (because, after all, there are only 24 hours in a day), or I can keep pursuing what solely interests me.
Popular Culture Exchange and Autism
I’ve never actually discussed the issue of popular culture exchange with other autistic people. But I know when I am with other autistics, their special interests are as intense as mine — sometimes maybe more so. Indeed, all autistic people can’t be polymaths, and we know that we’re not all savants. There is only a certain amount of energy possible during a day to absorb all there is to know about one’s interests and keep track of everything else.
One of the things I have noticed some autistic people do is redirect the conversation back to their interests, probably out of anxiety that the topics of the popular culture exchange are no longer within their comfort zone. We seemingly use randomized (even though they aren’t really random) scripted movie quotes and television shows. This doesn’t prove any overarching thesis I have that autistic people don’t care who wins the Super Bowl each year. I suspect I am in the vast minority of autistic people when it comes to that kind of disinterest. But it does indicate, albeit somewhat speculatively, that autistic people’s special interests, for us, come before the world’s cultural touchstones as a matter of priority.
I would also venture to guess that pop culture is more complex for us autistics because it constantly changes. A meme is all in, and then something new will replace it next week. Will Smith slaps Chris Rock, and then there’s the next scandal. My guess is that we autistic individuals look for touchstones and interests in our lives tethered to something longer-lasting as it provides us with consistency and more certainty — almost a sort of timelessness if you will. Maybe this is what Simon and Garfunkel meant in their song I Am a Rock.
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb
A Happy Medium?
So, is there a happy medium here? And no, I am not talking about an ecstatic person who enjoys communing with the dead. Or a happy platform of writers.
I think there is.
Let’s go back to my example regarding Black Mirror. Indeed, I had never heard of it. But once I watched an episode, I became hooked. This was an example of when, once I heard of something and exposed myself to it, I realized it aligned with one of my interests. So rather than forcing oneself to consume garbage to have something to say, perhaps be open to the possibility that there are always new things to discover…as long as they interest you. Let yourself hold on to the possibility of finding cool, new things in your life that match what you already crave but weren’t aware of previously.
But ah, what to do about the social anxiety? After all, I really don’t care who won the Superbowl; I don’t care about the commercials, the halftime show, etc. What do you and I do about that daily?
We can either force ourselves to stay on top of these things to have a better “script” to go into our daily social encounters and engage in popular culture exchange, or we can white knuckle it. As for what I do out of necessity, I pretend to be interested. I’ll listen, sure, and react accordingly. But if they are talking about the Super Bowl, I can’t very well add much to the conversation other than feign interest. But I can add, “You won’t believe this; I’m probably the only guy you’ll meet today who has said this to you, but I’m really not into football.” My experience is that saying this makes me seem like an interesting person. I do get the “What planet do you live on?” response occasionally, but other people want to know what I was doing that was so important as to interrupt my interest in the Super Bowl. If they wanted to know I was watching a news outlet, I could tell them that. But I figure that’s probably not the case.
We can also purposefully redirect the conversation. Speaking for myself, as long as the other person thinks that I am listening to them and care about their interests, I can shift the conversation and “reclaim my time.” If they talk about a TikTok video everyone has seen, I can relate it to an Ed Sullivan episode I saw recently and use how things have changed in society as the connecting thread. This doesn’t always work. It usually doesn’t. But it shows, hey, at least I’m trying; I’m not just going to stare off into empty space and be rude while you talk about something I have no interest in. I’ll give you your due, and then please try to give me mine. If you don’t want to or can’t, then maybe we can just be polite acquaintances instead of friends. And that’s usually how things turn out for me.
Popular Culture Exchange: I’d like this subject to be researched. There’s been a lot of important research on how autistics are represented in the media, the appropriation of neurotypicals playing autistics in films and TV when autistics could do it themselves, etc. But since most casual conversation relies on popular culture at large, which many of us, I strongly suspect, miss out on, it is no wonder many of us struggle content-wise in social situations. We can’t participate in popular culture exchange or choose not to.
