Pop Culture & Collectivism

Trends develop rapidly in this digital world of ours. The fact that our consumption of popular culture is highly informed by what our peers are also consuming is nothing new but, the speed with which television shows, films, games, and alike garner popularity has increased markedly. Our online culture has become one of inadvertent recommendation. We disseminate our opinions freely and regularly and consequently partake in a judgment profile for everything from pop culture to politics to controversial issues. Even topics which by nature require expert knowledge, like medicine, nutrition, and law, are discussed with undue authority by everyday people armed with Google and a social media network.

When it comes to popular culture this new accessible sharing is actually pretty cool. Nowadays we can make informed decisions about what we want to watch based on the reviews of our peers. We have access to more than just the television shows or films that our networks and cinemas elect to screen and we can watch multiple episodes back to back. This rapid consumption has been dubbed ‘binging’ or ‘binge watching’ and provides all the comfort of a junk food binge.

Instead of watching an episode per week and waiting months to reach the climax of a television programme, the new way of consumption seems to be to obsessively devour an entire season (or seasons), via sites like Netflix, before moving onto something else. There is nothing more painful to the modern pop culturalist than getting hooked on a new programme which forces them to wait a week for each new ep. It is practically barbaric.

As we feed our own opinions back into the machine, contributing to the meteoric buzz of popularity, we take part in a more intense social experience than we have previously known. Instead of exchanging a few minutes of chit chat with colleagues and friends about last night’s episode of E.R. or The Sopranos, we now find ourselves engaged in depth debates online with friends and strangers as to the merits and shortcomings of any given piece of pop culture. Bloggers dissect films, video games, TV shows, and even podcasts, in reviews that can sometimes seem as long as a dissertation or thesis. Recaps and breakdowns of episodes can be found a plenty by just chucking a title into Google. Hashtags can reveal thousands upon thousands of relevant tweets and memes multiple like rabbits providing ‘in jokes’ for consumers.

Popular culture and media have become multilayered and multifaceted entities with a kind of Inception-like set of interchangeable and interacting platforms. A television programme no longer stands alone as a piece of work, rather it is a live, dynamic product which people can interact with and create further pop culture from in the form of podcasts, blogs, fan fiction, and forums. Our experience has gone beyond a two dimensional relationship between person and screen. It is a shared experience and that experience is enriched by our engagement with others.

This new landscape of shared space and entertainment has seen a fascinating development of acceptable codes of conduct and manners. Just as humans have developed social etiquettes for in person interaction and public behaviour, we have necessarily begun to organize ourselves into a kind of ordered chaos in which there are a set of expectations that are considered good practice but which are often ignored. The ‘spoiler alert’ is a good example of this. The wealth of online content for any given pop culture piece means that we often have to dodge spoilers until we have the time to sit down and watch the piece ourselves. We make this dodging easier for each other by providing spoiler alerts on articles and blogs. There is also an expectation that a degree of considerate discretion be exercised by those who watch a film, for example, upon its first release. To avoid online confrontation they should refrain from disclosing any information about the piece which could spoil it for a watcher. While many of us adhere to these unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rules, it is inevitable that those who care not for the enjoyment of others or who enjoy online confrontations actively seek to spoil. They mostly tend to be arseholes and the recommended way to avoid their spoilers is to simply unfollow, unfriend, or block them.

The beauty of art is that everyone can take from it their own meaning and lessons. Despite the intentions of the writer, painter, musician etc, art is entirely subjective and this is one of the most enjoyable things about it. This subjectivity comes under threat in our new collective consumption. We are exposed to so many opinions and reviews often before we have even consumed the piece ourselves, that we rarely have the opportunity to experience pure, unadulterated personal understanding. Instead we hold on to the knowledge we already have and take preconceptions of the quality, content, and meaning, into our viewing. However, on the flip side, if we are able to approach a piece with untainted eyes, collectivism gives us the opportunity to engage in retrospective analysis with others. We can espouse what we elicited from the piece while learning what others took out of it. It enriches our understanding and allows us to delve deeper into considering the piece in the context of varied subjective experiences.

I challenge you, my (probably lone) reader, to count the ways you engage with pop culture. Next time you sit down to binge watch something on Netflix consider how you arrived at the decision to watch it. Where have you seen it discussed? What preconceptions are you taking into watching it? And following your watch, do you share your experience with others? Do you tweet? Facebook? Write a think piece? Or do you seek out the reception it has had from others? You will be surprised because even if you think you consume pop culture privately, you are importing and exporting knowledge from online platforms constantly and that engagement contributes to your experience whether you like it or not.