hyalineskies

There’s no need to hit the streets and ask people about popular culture anymore: one can just look at Facebook for halfway reliable metrics of the college population. It’s interesting to examine Facebook’s built-in Pulse metrics, which outline the general attitudes of the college mainstream. Globally (as of 1 September 2006) students seem to enjoy alternative rock from popular bands such as Coldplay, Dave Matthews, and Green Day; these same artists are reflected in my own University of Michigan’s charts. However, the statistics show the Wolverines as being fans of The Postal Service, Kanye West, and Ben Folds, none of which appear on the Facebook list. If we move across the world to Oxford, we see an even larger disparity: only four of the top ten bands are shared between Michigan and Oxford. Three of ten movies appear as commonalities. In books, only classics such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Orwell’s 1984 are found in common with one another. If comparing Ann Arbor to London seems too drastic, comparing Michigan to Michigan State or a cross-continent school such as UC Berkeley shows us marked discrepancies between schools, either of similar ethnographic composition or differing region.

It seems that what we’re calling pop culture is becoming increasingly broad, as those around the country (and the world) find increasingly niche genres to call their own. Meanwhile, marketing dollars are spent not to appeal to a mass market, but rather to separate subcultures: franchises have been constructed to maintain celebrities in genres of music such as rock and hip-hop. Specialty stores cater to goths, preps, and other high-school stereotypes, raking in profit from multiple niche communities. Reality television also segments and redefines pop culture in creating new supposedly-pop, manufactured acts such as American Idol winners Kelly Clarkson and Ruben Studdard. Microcelebrities are created in seasons of MTV’s The Real World. As marketers scramble to turn profit out of the smallest niches, be it the import tuning, 2Fast2Furious scene or the always funny video-game-to-movie market (resulting in awful films such as BloodRayne,) what is and what isn’t pop culture becomes almost impossibly hard to detect.

With social media-oriented books like Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail gaining more acceptance, we see those examining social media as a cultural phenomenon driving people into smaller and smaller subcultures, as people use the cheap (and frequently free) software available to create their own communities for previously unnoticed social activities. Whether you have a creepy fetish or an obsession with collecting lawn mowers, a community most likely exists for your type online. Of course, if you don’t like the world around you, there are even alternate realities, such as Linden Lab’s Second Life or Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, in which one could immerse themselves almost entirely. Anthropologically, these social segments we affiliate with get smaller in population and larger in quantity: a worker of fifty years ago had fellow tradesmen, regional music, and some popular hobbies with which to pass the time. Friends were predominantly local and music genres were primarily limited to those radio-worthy and record labels with enough capital to press and distribute vinyl recordings. Now, the same person has the ability to select the most obscure choices that tailor themselves to that person’s preferences almost exactly. Consumer utility is shifted to an entirely different microeconomic level. The segmentation of culture seems to make everyone happier.

With the speed at which new software is allowing us to find specialised content, be it bands on MySpace or videos on YouTube, as well as the perpetually decreasing costs of previously limiting factors such as bandwidth and hard disk space, it seems logical that this niche segmentation will eventually kill the concept of pop culture entirely: common celebrities cease to exist in any recognisable form, and the concept of a commercially-mandated mainstream falls to pieces as a democratic social system takes its place.

Introducing micropop culture

After all, the world without a marketable mainstream demographic seems petrifying to a corporate world built on economies of scale, manufacturing exact copies of the same product for the consumption of a socially insecure and pliable market. The fabrication of what is trendy becomes much more difficult when the users have control of what is interesting and what isn’t. Instead, the ideas of what we currently consider “pop” due to their mass influence could be truncated into its own subculture, a micropop culture of sorts, while other tiny niche cultures maintain their own trends within their diminutive spheres of influence.

Caveat Obviously, such a concept requires one to hold a majority of variables constant. To even reach a point in which pop culture becomes this segmented, social media will have to be able to freely flourish in a basically unlimited fashion, where the cost of computing and Internet access are decreased to a point in which the majority of a population can afford the tools to use social media applications. It is assumed that social media tools are prevalent and can be accessed by the majority of the population, as is the case in most lower-middle-class and higher citizens in America; it is also assumed that those with the ability to possess such technology do and are literate in its use. If social media is harnessed in such a way that the populace is seeking out its own individualised preferences, then this is at least a somewhat valid theory.

With social media tools penetrating deeper into socioeconomic segments daily, it seems that the concept of the micropop is little more than an inevitability. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of one with happier consumers.

If such a social segmentation does occur, the effects on our social information structure will most likely be drastic. Niches would continue to converge as the cost of finding more preferential communites decreases and new search tools make finding those communities infinitely easier. Assuming the niche community is what makes the people happiest, people will search for those closer and closer to their own interests, ignoring data they see as extraneous along the way.

Communication’s dark age?

It’s very possible that this segmentation could lead to a dark age of communication that social media detractors speak of as an impending doom, where people become so self-involved that the causes of humanity and social progress are lost on the way to personal fulfillment. It is easy for us to write in the asymptote where people care solely about the things that please them and their niche: after all, people are searching for the things that they care about and ignore those things with which they should be concerned. This phenomenon exists in some fashion with the current generation: students consume only the news that is fashionable within their own subculture, sometimes forming opinions on things with ignorance. (Forming solid opinions on some of these things don’t matter, as they are neither affecting your lifestyle nor the common lifestyle of your peers.)

This cultural apathy has the ability to be extrapolated into the get-anything social media sphere: today’s young people have unpredecented access to the information which interests them. While it would be silly to blame the social media applications themselves for this (especially given their relative infancy,) there is reason to assume that the increasing ability to find niche information may amplify this effect in the future. The smaller groups get (and the greater happiness that a person receives from a smaller segment,) the less inclined they would be to pay attention to other information which has now become even more irrelevant. This case of increased social segmentation, to the point of where society exists on a popular level simply for the sake of day-to-day transaction, could be a travesty for media. Culturally, such a polarised population would almost seem to reverse humanity’s progress during the Industrial Revolution, when multinational enterprise dictated the form and means of international communication, and would cause to some degree the same separation as before international communication, substituting online communities for geographical regions.

A light in the dark

Assuming the pessimist’s segregation theory holds true, it seems impractical from a consumer theory perspective that anyone would be happy of staying within a communicative dark age.

Without moving too deeply into consumer theory, efficiency laws of basic microeconomics state that all consumers, with common preferences, want to maximise their own happiness given whatever they were endowed with originally. Since people want content that tailors itself closest to their preferences, people would not stop in their niche communities; they would continue to seek out smaller and smaller groups.

For example, let’s say an executive of a large company enjoys NFL Football, regional microbrews, collecting classic BMW cars, running, reading business news, and has a closet addiction to romantic comedies. The chances of being able to find such a community, even in a world where finding people with common interests takes zero time in itself, is extremely slim, and with the expanse of information that would exist in each of these niches by the time the segregation point were to occur, even the most narrowcasted content would still be plagued by information overload.

It’s at this point where the executive suffers from this overload on even the smallest of levels, due to the maturity of information sorting tools that would be required to look through it for relevant data, as well as the amount of user-generated data that would still be relevant at this point. Eventually, the microniche itself becomes saturated with terabytes of content. It’s an interesting confusion as the user cannot maintain active roles in every one of his or her smaller communities, and building a community of those with exactly the same interests as you is nearly impossible due to statistical improbability.

This revelation of the inability to find niches in which one fits into can only result in some type of convergence to the individual, in which a user realises that his or her own preferences are entirely unique, with no true existing equivalent anywhere else in the world. At this stage, assuming the person would want to continue on a road to maximum happiness, the focus on shifting into smaller and smaller niche communities would eventually disappear: after all, at this stage the niche format would be inefficient. The individual is recognised solely as an individual, and all social interaction with others is treated without segment. People think as people, with disregard to interests of others. Segment affiliations begin to break down as the user gains absolute, total social power of the world that surrounds them. Of course, such an outcome is extremely optimistic, but is the most logical following if social information is allowed to permeate unrestricted through society’s socioeconomic and cultural strata.

The re-emergence of popular culture

This individual social power would theoretically no longer worry about group influence, as accepting group ideals would be a regression to the niche community and thus would result in the loss of found happiness. Faced with the inability to appeal to a popular group through manufactured trendiness, popular culture would become fully democratic, with pop culture bounded by neither genre nor stereotype, yielding only a mainstream of preference commonalities, dominated by individuals shaping the information landscape to themselves instead of being ruled by a commercial, consumerist demographic.

Culturally, reaching such an extreme theoretical case would be the true renaissance of social media. The ability to find relevant, interesting information and the accessibility of tools to create content for others (both of which are currently infantile technologically) would drive a social media user into niche-tailored content until the convergence at the individual, at which the used interacted with others on a truly individual scale, influenced by multiple world cultures and the individual perspectives of others. Global culture would eclipse regional culture, with the ultimate end being a globally-linked population, constantly interacting regardless of present-day discriminatory guidelines (as such prejudices would have to be invariably erased to maintain social interaction on such a diverse level from this extreme personal perspective.)

Is this concept possible? Absolutely. Is it realistic? Most likely not. Such a transcendent society would exist if the entire world’s population were given modern network infrastructure, and such technology is currently only available to developed countries with the infrastructure available to support such luxuries. Even then, governments must not restrict the free flow of information between countries, else inefficiencies would occur that would break the flow of such information. In the meantime, such utopian ideals exist as a reason to press forward with ambitious projects to propagate information technology into developing countries, via projects such as Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child, as well as the spread of free information within developed countries through the support of organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For now, with our support of a global information infrastructure (and the free flow of information within it, unbounded by political or geographical region,) we can only speculate where social media tools take us in the future twenty, even fifty years from now. To the detractors: don’t worry about the dark ages and the pitfalls possible. Where there is a dark age, there is most likely a renaissance to follow.