The Unified Internet is a Mess

​It feels like not that long ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about the demise of pop culture. How more and more everyone is getting sucked into an ever-increasing variety of entertainment choices and it is leading to a fractioning of our culture.
My argument was that if people didn’t have the same cultural touchstones, than our sense of unity, our way of looking at the world will start to fracture and splinter. I envisioned everyone having their own version of pop culture that overlapped here and there with other people, but was mostly unique to each person.
On the surface I know it might not sound like a bad thing. There have always been subcultures inside the mainstream. Nerds, goths, heavy metal, whatever, how is this anything other than the evolution of that? In a very real sense, it isn’t. It’s just taking those subgroups and dividing them farther. The problem isn’t individuality, I am in no way calling for people to conform. The problem isn’t the subgroups in and of themselves, it’s the lack of the mainstream. That is the problem I was worried about.
This conversation was a little bit before the great divide in the world known as covid, which more or less changed everything and not for the better. Stores aren’t open 24/7, drive-ins don’t show 2 movies for the price of one anymore. We used to be a civilized nation, it’s shameful. Anyways, back to the point of all this, now that we are on the other side of the massive shift that was covid, I started to think about that conversation and how I thought the world was going to look. I saw the world becoming more and more personalized for each person, to the point where no one understood each other’s references anymore.
But I was wrong. Somewhere along the way the internet changed. Everything shifted and coalesced into a handful of websites and a few different bubbles of pop culture. Yes, it is far more individualized than it ever used to be, but we didn’t end up with millions of different versions of pop culture. Instead, we rebuilt the mainstream culture that I thought we were going to lose, that I was so sure we needed in order to keep a shared sense of reality. A shared sense of culture. Only we did it wrong.
There used to be a shared sense of reality. A shared experience caused by mainstream media that unified our understanding of the world we lived in and what was happening in the world. Now, there were different views on what everything meant, and how we should react to what was happening. But those views came from a core set of information that defined us as a people.
That is no longer the case. When mainstream culture started to collapse, people rushed into fill the void. What that has left us with is a handful of different mainstream media that defines our culture. We now have vastly different views on what is happening, let alone why. A culture, a society, can not function or survive if there is no commonality. A country where tribal differences are the norm and not the exception will not survive. It has no core.
The internet boiling itself down to a handful of sites where everyone gathers was a mistake. It allowed people on those platforms to rewrite the rules. To become the new core of which society revolves. Not for the betterment of humanity, but for a chance to grow their wealth. It would have been bad enough if one platform or individual managed to do this, but multiple people gaining the same level of control at the same time, all with their own goals and desires, was disastrous.
The internet unifying itself to a handful of sites just as the world was shutting down and mainstream media was losing its grasp of control over the narrative of our shared experience has destroyed us as a people. People can no longer handle disagreements or points of view that differ from their own. People can’t seem to see the truth even when it screams in their face, because there is a whole network of infrastructure set up to keep people in their new realities.
I don’t know how to fix this, if it even can be fixed. But I do think a good place to start is to fracture the internet again. Take away the power from the handful of social media sites that own the public conversation. After that, well we need new sources of news. Not owned by the elites and not so dogmatic in whichever side that it lands on politically. We need a center from which we can form a union. Once we have that, we can disagree about what to do next. That’s normal in a healthy society. Important even. We just can’t have that, until we are all on the same page about what reality is, and what is happening in the world.