The Big Tent is Dead. And We are the Poorer For It.
Social media didn’t make American society stupid. But the rise of narrow information silos most certainly has.
Peak into my bedroom on a Sunday evening sometime circa 1985, you would have seen me working on homework, probably geometry that was due the next day. But I wasn’t just doing homework; no I was also listening to the radio and I wasn’t just listening to the radio, I was listening to American Top 40 with Kasey Kasem. Teenagers of the 1970s and 80s found some time on the weekend to settle in and listen to the biggest songs in pop music. From its start in 1970 until he left the position in 1988, millions of teens and young adults did something that might seem old-fashioned today: sitting in front of a radio and listening to the top songs for 3–4 hours.
I didn’t know it back then, but I was part of something that we took for granted in the 70s and 80s and that almost doesn’t exist today and that is mass culture, the big tent.
Mass culture, are the cultural products that are produced for the widest audience possible.
If you go back to an era where there were just three channels on television and no social media, you will find a time when many of us watched the same television shows and listened to the same…
