Culture is Becoming More Similar Than Different in the Digital Era

Big Endings

The past year has felt like a peak in mega-budget world-spanning media spectacles that command our attention, one outrageous finale after another. On April 26, 2019, the film Avengers: Endgame was released in the United States. Less an original narrative than an accretion of capital, technology, and celebrity, it had a budget of $356 million.

By July, the movie — the closing of a phase in the vast Marvel Cinematic Universe — was the highest-grossing movie in the history of Hollywood; it has so far achieved a global box office of around $2.8 billion. A month later, on May 19, the final episode of Game of Thrones aired on HBO, the end of an eight-season run that began in 2011. 19.3 million people watched the episode, a record for the series. The latest Star Wars film will cap off the franchise’s third trilogy on December 20 and attract millions more viewers. But it’s not just the stories that are ending.

Two Concerns

This communal moment of mass culture has occasioned celebration as well as a bout of anxiety. We’re in the midst of the Streaming Wars, with so many different media products and platforms competing for our attention — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, AppleTV+, and the still-to-come Peacock and HBO Max, to name but a few. Journalists and critics are worried that the huge popularity and sense of universality that Avengers and Game of Thrones achieved are now disappearing for good. The word often used to describe these omnipresent mass-entertainment products is “monoculture.”

The Ringer eulogized Game of Thrones as “the very last piece of TV monoculture” and Vulture “the last show we watch together.” “Monoculture is dead, or will die with Game of Thrones,” according to Lainey Gossip’s Elaine Lui. Now, “we watch what we like, and we cluster together with the people who also watch what we like.” Even the era of extensive recaps was pronounced over, if not the reign of prestige TV itself. We live in a “time of cultural fragmentation,” wrote Alex Shephard in the New Republic, arguing that not even the Nobel Prize for literature has survived as a representation of monoculture.

Within the monoculture obsession, there are two concerns. The first is that in the digital streaming era we have lost a perceived ability to connect over media products as reference points that everyone knows, the way that we used to discuss the weather or politics, at least in a bygone time before our realities were split by climate change and Fox News. The fear is that we exist in a fragmented realm of impenetrable niches and subcultures enabled by streaming media.

The second concern is that, because of the pressures of social media and the self-reinforcing biases of recommendation algorithms that drive streaming, culture is becoming more similar than different. We are worried that our digital niches cause a degree of homogenization, which the word monoculture is also used to describe.

“If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors,” Jennifer Senior wrote in a New York Times opinion piece about young-adult literature. Mass media has “been getting more mass,” wrote Farhad Manjoo, also in the Times, responding to the popularity of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which went from a TikTok meme to one of the most popular pop songs ever made, at least according to its time on the charts.

“Despite the barrage of choice, more of us are enjoying more of the same songs, movies and TV shows,” Manjoo continued. The effect is happening across different cultural industries: “We’re returning to a media monoculture,” made up of corporatized, homogenized websites instead of smaller blogs, Darcie Wilder wrote on the Outline. Martin Scorsese echoed the complaint when he argued that Marvel movies “aren’t cinema” but instead bland, market-tested products without artistic integrity.

These two concerns appear in some ways irreconcilable, and yet they coexist. Is there less monoculture today, or is culture more mass than ever? Are we siloed within our own preferences or are we unable to escape the homogenized net-average, consuming all the same things?

The debate over monoculture seems to be less about our inherent desire for CGI dragons or superheroes than human connection and recognition — the assuaging of some existential loneliness induced by the internet. With streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, you never really know how many people are watching, hearing, or following the same things you are, so you’re never sure which media experiences are shared in common and which are not. That leaves us consumers feeling adrift.

I. FRAGMENTATION

The Meaning of Monoculture

Monoculture is more a messy symbol than an exact term. The Latin root “cultura” means cultivation. Monoculture in a scientific sense is an “area of farm land on which only one crop is grown or one type of animal is kept.” Much of industrialized farming is monoculture: think vast stretches of corn or wheat, or the undifferentiated green of a suburban lawn.

Monoculture might be efficient as far as agricultural output, but it’s also dangerous, decreasing diversity, depleting soil, and using more water than varied fields. By the early 19th century, “culture” moved from referring to plants to the cultivation of learning and taste, and by the 20th century it described the “collective customs and achievements of a people.”

Today, the word monoculture is used to describe a monolithic culture: the range of artifacts, characters, voices, and stories that a specific demographic — Americans, for example — find recognizable and relatable. But the word also evokes a homogenized space, a Monocultural Cinematic Universe in which everything is bright, vapid, and family-friendly, and any whimpering of dissent is smoothed over into sameness: monotonous culture.

What Was the Monoculture?

The monoculture seems to refer to some ill-defined age of universality made up of everything from Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show to Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office — the 20th-century aegis of white, middlebrow American entertainment, usually starring white Americans. This was also the ascendant era of broadcast media in radio, film, and linear television (the term for cable and network TV that isn’t on-demand). Industry gatekeepers made top-down decisions about what content would be made and when it would be shown, resulting in a lack of diversity that is only now beginning to change.

Monoculture is a Pleasantville image of a lost togetherness that was maybe just an illusion in the first place, or a byproduct of socioeconomic hegemony. It wasn’t that everyone wanted to watch primetime Seinfeld, but that’s what was on, and it became universal by default.

  

Digital Monoculture

We are in the midst of determining if the kind of monoculture that thrived during the broadcast era can exist when many forms of media are opt-in: we can watch whatever we want, when we want. The “digital monoculture” could refer to the array of popular, recognizable reference points that have arisen and are accessed through the on-demand internet, whether it’s Game of Thrones or “Baby Shark.”

The universality that monoculture entails is valuable, because what everyone already knows is what they are likely to keep consuming — hence the overwhelming popularity of reboots and sequels. It’s also why Netflix paid $100 million in 2018 to keep Friends on its platform for another year (WarnerMedia later outbid Netflix, $85 million a year for five years, to put the show on HBO Max).

Big-budget productions try to worm material into the now-fragmented monocultural framework by manufacturing new universal reference points, as The Mandalorian has with its insta-meme Baby Yoda. Piggybacking on old monoculture is less risky than starting from scratch. The most successful example of digital-native monoculture might be Netflix’s Stranger Things, which merited the iconic public display of billboards in Times Square (not coincidentally, it’s also a show that references decades of pop culture).

Businesses turn their own intellectual property into self-reproducing mini-monocultures because monopolies are easiest to monetize. The streaming platforms and their various signature franchises form walled gardens, a metaphor that also recalls the scientific definition of monoculture: nothing else is allowed to grow there; there is no cross-pollination. Surely the monoculture isn’t quite dead if Netflix viewers have consumed a net 500 million hours of Adam Sandler movies.

Watching Together

More than a sheer volume of viewers, what monoculture entails is a feeling. Linear TV gave us a monocultural feeling because we knew millions, tens of millions, of other people were watching the same channel as us at the same time, though we couldn’t see them. While tuned in we felt connected to the “grid of 200 million,” the social community of American TV watchers that George W.S. Trow observed in his 1980 essay on television, Within the Context of No Context. (Social media is our new grid, and its fervent fandoms in part a response to the desire for more communal experience.)

Streaming television lacks much of that feeling because it is on-demand and because the platforms are pointedly opaque about their metrics for the sake of protecting their business models. (Nielsen ratings, which publicly measure linear TV audiences, are only just starting to cover streaming services.)

The only way of knowing how many other people are consuming the latest season of Bojack Horseman at the same time you are is to check some other part of the internet, like searching a show’s hashtag on Twitter. This kind of asynchronicity is particularly deadly for talk shows, which Netflix has been struggling to produce. Maybe the format was optimized for linear TV, sparking watercooler chat that you didn’t have to preface with the streaming-era refrain, “Are you watching _______?” The answer is rarely yes.

  

Streaming “forces a little bit more evangelism,” investor Hunter Walk told me. Walk is the co-founder of the venture-capital firm Homebrew, which invests in digital platforms, and a commentator on new-media consumption habits. “If you’re watching something early or first, you’re going to be the carrier of that to your friends.” The feeling digital media induces is, “‘It’s my job to get them to watch it so we can talk about it,’” he continued. We all become the programming head of our own virtual TV network, deciding what gets airtime and what doesn’t.

If monoculture depends on this feeling of watching together, then streaming makes it more difficult to establish, because we watch different things at different paces for different reasons. Though widespread popularity is clearly still possible, there’s a newfound distinction between media’s content — its subject matter — and its context — the social environment, or lack thereof, in which we consume it. Certain shows rely on generating a public discourse while others thrive without it, or find fans only in an online niche. As Walk put it: “Some things you watch just because your friends are watching it; some things you watch even if your friends aren’t watching it. I don’t give a shit what my friends think about Westworld. I need the sub-Reddit that’s going to unpack the foreshadowing.”

Monoculture is a subjective, shifting frame of reference, not a default reality. Walk’s points underline how we now create our own communities around consuming and discussing particular media. On Twitter, I feel like Succession has fully saturated the discourse and become inescapable, but elsewhere, linear TV’s This Is Us is the height of popularity.

At its peak after the 2018 Super Bowl, This Is Us had some 27 million viewers in one day, while Succession only hit one million during its recent season-two finale. A show about mean rich people isn’t exactly universal, but it gets talked about more intensely in certain media-dense environments and thus takes on the aspects of active monoculture, where This Is Us has faded in coverage from magazines and entertainment websites, though many more people watch it.

A Chart of Digital Media Consumption

When we talk about monoculture, it usually includes content that is widely consumed, and socially consumed. We could arrange various modes of digital media consumption on a chart, with a horizontal axis of the scale at which the content was designed to exist (trying to appeal to many people, or a smaller group?) and a vertical axis of the context in which the content is consumed (do you actively discuss it with others, or watch it privately?). We can fill it in with a few linear and streaming TV shows:

In the top-right corner, Social-Mass, is the relevant monoculture, the stuff that is actively creating its own communities of interest and public discussion. In the lower-right, Intimate-Mass represents the mundane monoculture, the productions that are already familiar comforts. The top-left is the first draft of monoculture, the Social-Niche content that a smaller demographic of advance tastemakers pore over intensely. The bottom-left is content consumed predominantly as a personal pleasure, which might never make it into the public sphere.

Shows and movies (or any cultural products) can move across the categories over time, and exist on a spectrum of points between them. Fleabag, for example, had a gradual movement from Intimate-Niche to Social-Niche to Social-Mass — the hot-priest-meme stage.

Linear TV has an incentive to keep as many viewers as possible from changing the channel, which confines its content to the right side of the chart: shows you can’t miss without feeling left out and shows you don’t mind rewatching if you stumble upon them. The top-right, must-watch products usually fall to the bottom-right over time. We get bored of them, though nostalgia maintains some appeal. (Fleabag wrapped up just before it fully succumbed to its popularity and became tiresome.)

Watching Separately

Digital streaming can better occupy the left side of the chart, supplying content that we can discuss in small, dispersed communities online or simply watch by ourselves. (For me, that purpose is filled by the soothing Japanese reality show Terrace House; I don’t need everyone to like it, and I know they never will.) Netflix’s never-ending supply of food shows that are 75 percent slow-motion B-roll — Chef’s Table, Taco Chronicles, The Chef Show, Street Food — demonstrate its commitment to content we barely have to pay attention to or talk about at all. You could call it ambient television, the obverse of big-budget monoculture. David Chang’s latest addition to the Ambient Netflix genre, Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner, is what you would get if you recorded a celebrity podcast with their mouth full.

Maybe it’s not that we have less monoculture today; it’s that we’re more aware of everything else in the other quadrants of the chart. They appear as a threat to the old regime, which was accustomed to manufacturing monoculture quickly and easily through the content monopolies of broadcast media. Studios, directors, and producers of the past were better able to dictate our tastes because there were no other convenient options for on-demand entertainment.

Martin Scorsese critiqued the Marvel movies’ lack of communal social context as well as their artistic content: “To be in a packed house in one of the old theaters watching Rear Window was an extraordinary experience: It was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the picture itself, and it was electrifying.” The director is mourning the IRL universality that his work — that by no means emerged from a universal perspective — was able to achieve under the old system. He mourns his ability to impose his auteurship on massive audiences.

Scorsese complains about the homogenization of “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified” content. Yet in terms of representation and access, for people who aren’t Martin Scorsese, this change feels like a step forward. The range of widely available mass media no longer represents the vision of only one demographic group. The retro-monoculture of Goodfellas, or Friends, or Seinfeld, is just one choice among many. But what do our other choices look like?

II. HOMOGENIZATION

Jazz

Rather than the monoculture dictated by singular auteurs or industry gatekeepers, we are moving toward a monoculture of the algorithm. Recommendation algorithms — on Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, or Spotify — are responsible for much of how we move through the range of on-demand streaming media, since there’s too much content for any one user to parse on their own. We can make decisions, but they are largely confined to the range of options presented to us. The homepage of Netflix, for example, offers only a window into the platform’s available content, often failing to recommend what we actually want. We can also opt out of decision-making altogether and succumb to autoplay.

Spotify in particular demonstrates the effects of algorithmic culture, since the decision of which song to listen to or whether to interrupt the stream happens so much more often than a TV show or movie. For example, I started an album on Spotify by Bill Evans while cooking dinner for friends. The album continued playing for hours. Except it wasn’t the album; it was a series of tracks that sound more or less like the album — syncopated piano, upright bass, brushed drums — weaving between tracks by Evans and other jazz musicians in a pleasantly monotonous wash. I barely registered the change until everyone left and I went to my laptop to turn it off, noticing the playlist that accrued, filled with artists’ names that I promptly forgot.

The Problem with Automatic Suggestions

The jazz monotony is passive: Since Spotify’s radio function is automated, I can consume more music without thinking about it. Without anyone thinking about it, in fact, except the recommendation algorithm making its calculations and supplying the next song. My own private monoculture builds up under the heading of Bill Evans-esque jazz, a kind of jazz that the algorithm delimits for me. We media consumers end up smoothly siloed into how a recommendation algorithm has predefined a particular genre or medium, like the Plinko game in Price Is Right: the chip takes a random path down the board, but ends up in one of just a few slots. The algorithm’s definition is often wrong, or at least incomplete.

In September 2019, the country music star Martina McBride attempted to create a country playlist on Spotify. The platform can automatically recommend songs to add to a playlist; in this case, it suggested 14 pages of songs by male country artists before it came up with a single woman. McBride was shocked, posting on Instagram: “Is it lazy? Is it discriminatory? Is it tone deaf? Is it out of touch?”

Jada Watson, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies country radio airplay, tried the same experiment and took 12 refreshes to get a woman. Even though, for research purposes, Watson only uses Spotify to listen to women musicians, she found that: “Within the first 200 songs (19 refreshes), only 6 songs (3%) by women and 5 (3%) by male-female ensembles were included (all emerging after 121 songs by male artists).” 121 songs! Shouldn’t a well-trained algorithm know her obvious preferences?

Contrary to our expectations of personalization, Spotify’s playlist-recommendation function only takes into account the title of the playlist, not the habits of the individual user. According to the algorithm, country = men, an equation that not even a playlist titled “Country Music By Musicians With Vaginas” could shake. Spotify had created its own homogenous definition of the genre, a “very narrow perspective of what country music means,” as Watson told me.

Technology users are increasingly aware of how biased algorithms can be, but as the rampant sharing of Spotify end-of-year recaps shows, we still have a general expectation that algorithmic recommendations at least reflect our own taste. Yet the country-music playlist problem demonstrates how individualization fails, or is more about marketing than actual technology.

We all get driven toward the same things. “You expect it to be an equal playing field or a space where you have a greater variety of choice, but it actually looked like any old country radio playlist,” Watson said. This both immediately decreases diversity and operates at the level of perception: If we think we are getting relatively unbiased, data-backed recommendations, then we’re even more likely to absorb the way an algorithm defines a genre and accept it as all that exists.

Addendum: A Holistic Index of Taste

Every recommendation algorithm is different, and some are better or more complex than others. The veteran music app Pandora now indexes podcasts as well as songs; the two data-sets are also cross-referenced, so your podcast-listening data can be applied to your music recommendations in order to improve them.

Oscar Celma, Pandora’s head of research, told me about these “cross-domain recommendations.” People who listen to “The Bible: Son of God” podcast also listen to Casting Crowns and Chris Tomlin. People who like true crime podcasts listen to Five Finger Death Punch and Post Malone. People who listen to “Fresh Air” like Norah Jones and Van Morrison (duh). “Six Minutes,” a podcast for children, correlates with Kidz Bop and Taylor Swift. Amazon also benefits from this kind of holistic data set: The more it knows about what you buy, the better it knows which TV shows you’re likely to watch on its streaming service, applying one marketplace to the other and forming a more perfect recommendation algorithm.

Data Drives Sameness

Watson described how the country radio charts, like Billboard’s Hot Country Songs list, which includes streaming, “have become incredibly homogenous, not just in gender but with songs that stay number one the entire year.” She sees the homogenization of music as being caused by data — a consequence of the fact that streaming, radio, and record companies can access more information about their listeners than ever, faster than ever.

“Now that everything’s digital, we have data every minute of every hour of every day,” Watson said. “In the past it was very manual, reported over phone or paper — that’s really slow.” On the broadcaster side, the data motivate snap business judgments: “If a particular style is really driving ratings of your service up, whether radio or streaming, you’ll want to continue to play that kind of artist, based on fear of loss of ratings.” On the label side, the data create an excuse for homogenization. “If artist X is doing really well with a particular style, or a particular production value, then a label might do the same thing with artist Y,” explained Watson.

These are not new strategies, of course; culture is always driven toward copycatting by money and the hope of a larger audience. But the difference is how fast the iterative loop happens, and how algorithmic recommendations intensify the effect across cultural areas: music, television, interior design, or even plastic surgery.

We thought the long tail of the internet would bring diversity; instead we got sameness and the perpetuation of the oldest biases, like gender discrimination. The best indicator of what gets recommended is what’s already popular, according to the investor Matthew Ball, a former head of strategy at Amazon Studios. “Netflix isn’t really trying to pick individual items from obscurity and get you to watch it,” Ball said. “The feedback mechanisms are reiterating a certain homogeneity of consumption.”

An Updated Definition of Monoculture for 2020

Instead of discrete, brand-name cultural artifacts, monoculture is now culture that appears increasingly similar to itself wherever you find it. It exists in the global morass of Marvel movies designed to sell equally well in China and the United States; the style of K-Pop, in music and performance, spreading outside of Korea; or the profusion of recognizably minimalist indie cafes from Australia to everywhere else. These are all forms of monoculture that don’t rely on an enforced, top-down sameness, but create sameness from the bottom up. Maybe the post-internet monoculture is now made up of what is aesthetically recognizable even if it is not familiar — we quickly feel we understand it even if we don’t know the name of the specific actor, musician, show, or director.

A monocultural product reinforces our established range of taste-signifiers rather than challenging them or adding something new. Is it better to choose between a few things that everyone knows, or between 100 things that share a fundamental similarity, algorithmically sorted into a you-may-also-like category? The latter may not be that much more authentic, original, or diverse than the former. In fact, it often feels oppressive, as if there isn’t much of a choice at all. By the metric of similarity, we have more monoculture than ever.

Streambait and Spotify-core

Each digital platform is its own monoculture, with a homogenized style optimized for the structure of the platform and the algorithms that serve its recommendations. There are monocultures of Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter (see all the “RT this with the worst thing you ever ate for breakfast” tweets). The sameness creates an aura of communal recognizability. The writer Liz Pelly coined the term “streambait” in a 2018 essay to refer to “this idea of creating music that people will stream and continue to stream, similar to the concept of clickbait,” she told me in an interview.

A related label is “Spotify-core,” used by the New York Times journalist Jon Caramanica to describe a song by the virtual Instagram influencer Miquela. Miquela’s 2017 track “Not Mine” is characteristic of the style as it now stands: soft vocals, an airy backbeat like the echoes from a club, and slight acoustic touches. Pleasant, ignorable, and instantly forgettable — not great but not the kind of thing that would make you pause the stream.

Streambait’s stars range from pop favorites — Billie Eilish and Lana del Rey — to more indie streaming grist like Big Thief, Clairo, and Cuco, who have all made it to mainstream attention via the internet. Spotify’s narcotized Chill Hits playlist, with over 5.1 million followers, is the genre’s breeding ground.

Like airplay on a major radio station, when a song hits a big playlist, it gets popular, promotes the musician to new listeners, and makes money. “Labels have been incentivized to either make music that fits on playlists or prioritize music that works on these playlists,” Pelly said — adapting to the Spotify monoculture like a goldfish to a pond. Optimization comes at the expense of originality. According to Pelly, streambait “is similar to the way that clickbait has a negative impact on journalism, when editorial decisions are made based on what is popular.”

“There’s a negative impact on art when such a high value is placed on what is popular,” she said. “Popularity is not a good metric for deciding the value of art.”

 Is What Is Popular Necessarily Good?

 Relying on algorithms to dictate our culture means evaluating things on the basis of popularity, engagement, scale, and speed. Yet we already know that what is popular is not necessarily good, and what is good is not necessarily popular. On top of that, the data provided by Netflix and Spotify are biased, shaped by their proprietary algorithms, which are black boxes, not transparent and precise evaluations of human taste. With social and streaming media, there might be more ways around the gatekeepers of the past. But algorithms are the new gatekeepers. Their parameters are still set by a small group: not Hollywood producers, but white, male engineers and data scientists.

What gets surfaced is still a small subset of what exists, and it doesn’t get surfaced in a democratic or transparent way, as Galaxie 500’s Damon Krukowski discovered looking at his band’s Spotify account. Their volume of plays from “Spotify algorithmic playlists” has been slowly declining, but the platform gives no reason or explanation for the change. “Which leaves us, too, a passive participant in all this,” Krukowski wrote. Passivity is not a good quality for making or consuming art.

Mono-Monoculture

The critics giving Avengers and Game of Thrones the epitaph of Last Universal Content are wrong: Today’s form of monoculture is both larger in scale and less human, more mechanically automated, than ever before. Culture is now Big Data. Just what we have lost in the transition from human to machine tastemakers is still bearing out.

There seems to be more opportunity for diversity (anything can theoretically go viral) and yet the cultural artifacts that do become mainstream appear relentlessly optimized for the digital platforms of the attention economy. Take “Old Town Road,” for example. It’s a song by the creator of a popular Twitter account that was primed to spread on TikTok, then embraced as a meme, and then made even more famous by a preexisting country-music celebrity. The song itself is fine, but the most interesting thing about it is how it’s a product of the structures that now govern our digital culture.

Instead of worrying about the loss of monoculture, I’m more concerned that there isn’t enough room for products or projects (or even places) that are not memes, that aren’t pre-optimized for sharing or scaling. In the end I fall more on Scorsese’s side of the argument, though I wouldn’t wish for any more Scorsese: The non-homogenized alternatives to the mainstream become harder and harder to find. As we grow more accustomed to the algorithmic monoculture, allowing it to occupy our senses, we might lose our understanding of, or our taste for, anything else.

Lofi Monocultural Beats to Exist to

If you want a vision of the future of culture, imagine an infinite playlist of lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to, in all media — forever. Picture the ambient-music YouTube channel’s aesthetic applied to everything else: anodyne, blameless, meaningless, boring, designed only to occupy time. Form will outweigh content’s authorship, originality, or artistry. The future will be to the present as TikTok is to prestige television.

Human™ Culture

Digital-platform companies seem to be realizing that they need to move away from totally automatic recommendations, or at least appear to do so. They are turning to human “curators” as a way to break from algorithmic sameness and demonstrate that there’s still a personal (that is to say monocultural) connection when consuming digital content. They are deploying humanity as branding.

Earlier this year, Netflix began testing playlists curated by “experts on the company’s creative teams” with themes like “Artful Adventures” and “Critics Love These Shows.” Facebook is hiring curators — “seasoned journalists” — for its News Tab in order to fight misinformation. You shouldn’t let “computers decide what you want,” the CEO of Disney Bob Iger said during a Wall Street Journal technology conference. HBO’s latest advertising campaign is titled “Recommended by Humans,” featuring human fans explaining why they like the human HBO shows that they have watched with their human eyes. Preference appears to be shifting away from the algorithmic, similar to how consumers might prize handmade goods over mass-manufactured ones.

These are attempts to reassure us that our culture is not yet fully robotic, that it is still meaningful. In the end, we shouldn’t just want to consume things that are fully engineered to attract our attention, which gets converted into money. We should actively seek out elements of messiness and magic, serendipity that pure data can’t provide. As HBO’s head of programming Casey Bloys told the Los Angeles Times: “Our shows will never exist just to exist; they all have something to say about the world.”

Bloys gave the example of Succession: The show was motivated by his own personal desire to see a resonant story about family, not some abstract, algorithmic calculation. He made the decision not to hire established celebrity actors for the show, which would mathematically increase its chances of attention, but to start from scratch with lesser-known talent: “At HBO, we make our own stars,” Bloys said.

The result is a successful example of human taste, something that we didn’t quite recognize and didn’t yet know we wanted (the opposite of how Netflix claimed in 2013 that it made House of Cards because of Big Data). Succession was an unhomogenized surprise that could be on its way to becoming new monoculture.

The Value of Surprise

Art’s deepest impact comes when it is least expected. In contrast, algorithmic recommendations lead us down a path of pleasant monotony: a looming monoculture of the similar. To resist it, we should embrace obscurity, difficulty, diversity, and strangeness as just as important as recognizability or universality.

These are the qualities that need most to be preserved against the frictionless consumption pushed by our automated feeds. Otherwise, any new, surprising content that enters the machine of digital monoculture will quickly have its innovative quirks stripped and copied, scaled up and repeated until they become cliches. They will be incorporated into a constantly updated global homogeneity that possesses the sheen of familiarity but no substance beyond style.

III. RESISTING THE MONOCULTURE

Introspection

Reading the author Caleb Crain’s recent novel Overthrow, I was particularly struck by a single line: “It’s like there’s a sumptuary law against introspection,” the character Elspeth pronounces after getting badmouthed on the internet. (Sumptuary laws are rules governing consumption, often limiting what lower classes can buy or wear.) Elspeth considers how thinking too much, or being too self-aware, might be cast as an excessive, illegal luxury.

Overthrow is, in part, about the uncanniness of post-internet life, when you are never sure when you’re being surveilled and what some distant server might know about you, or which thoughts or desires could be subconscious digital implants rather than your own. The novel’s protagonists resist the numbing effects of automated surveillance capitalism through their participation in an Occupy-esque protest, deploying Tarot cards and (perhaps) gentle mind-reading powers to resist the invasive specter of technology.

I called Crain to talk about what he meant by this antipathy of introspection. “We’re in this moment where just being alone and by yourself and having your own thoughts that maybe you don’t share is almost frowned upon,” he said. There is a pressure to make every statement as unambiguous as possible: to be a huge fan of the new thing. The monoculture actually dominates public discourse, an effect intensified by the media industry’s decline and the lack of opportunities for well-paid criticism, according to Crain: “Unless you’re weighing in on the big cultural product of the moment, who cares what you think?”

The algorithm is a replacement for our internal monologues and our judgements about what we want to consume. Streaming’s passivity is different from linear TV, but in the end, it’s still passive. In a 2017 interview, the author, critic, and former Twitter celebrity Teju Cole likewise described social media as “a monster that feeds on noise” that “could not allow for a kind of distance, silence, refocusing of energies.” In a recent essay, Zadie Smith critiqued the “digital maw” that digests our language and spits it back at us, warped and commodified. For Smith, the excess of data forms a “shadow text” that replaces human culture with its uncanny facsimile.

Under these conditions, pursuing obscurity instead of attempting to participate in the monoculture becomes a defense mechanism and a survival strategy.

“I personally like the idea of hiding out, finding your own rabbit hole. I think I believe in making yourself irrelevant as an almost spiritual quest,” Crain told me. “Every time you open a book that nobody has recommended, you hope that you’ll find that secret voice that you needed to hear, that nobody could have told you was there.”

The magic is still in what the algorithm can’t surface, what data doesn’t touch — the introspective space in which you can develop your own opinions in private before making them public commodities and measuring them against the mainstream. Because once something enters the cycle of digital monoculture, its essence will, inevitably, be lost. So enjoy it while you can.

Bathroom Rembrandt

The desire for monoculture is understandable, though its disappearance is more perception than reality. Art is communal. We want to connect with other people over experiences that we share in common. But just as important is being alone, having a unique encounter — not seamlessly recommended or autoplayed — with something that another person created, and then gauging your deepest emotional response. The internet makes this more difficult, even as it makes sharing (or superficially liking) things easier and faster.

I often think of something the New Yorker’s longtime art critic Peter Schjeldahl said in a 2007 interview, a kind of manifesto for his criticism: “Give me a Rembrandt in a subway station toilet and a flashlight and I’m happy.” I take this to mean that the delivery mechanism of culture doesn’t have to be slick and seamless, nor does the way we consume it. The masterpiece doesn’t have to be shown off in a white-walled gallery and the viewer handed an espresso in a porcelain cup. It is worth a struggle to access, Schjeldahl argued; perhaps the struggle, the precarious intimacy of the experience, makes worthwhile art shine even more.

Rembrandt died in 1669, impoverished, in obscurity. And yet it is his late work, the deeply luminous portraits with scumbled brushstrokes, completely unpopular with his contemporaries, that strikes us most today. It took centuries for the paintings to become mainstream. The process was neither fast nor convenient, though it may now seem like a foregone conclusion.

Digital media, by contrast, prioritizes immediate engagement over the slow blooming of art. I get the sense that today’s algorithms would prioritize Deep Dream patterns — a memetic style without content — over late Rembrandt. The danger of prioritizing the monoculture is that we might not get as many Rembrandts in the future.

Watching Separately, Together

Instead of taking the place of linear television’s monoculture, the streaming-media internet can, at its best, be more like a digital permaculture: an ecosystem of smaller platforms and bigger; smaller projects and bigger; and artists both famous and not, all sustaining each other. The anxiety comes more from the ways that we find and share the things that we’re interested in.

At a moment when culture is indeed more “mass” than ever, accepting the freedom of going outside of what’s already popular can be scary. But if we don’t take the risk, the other option is boredom, the boredom of having too much content and none of it interesting enough.

Can monoculture survive the algorithm? And should it? By Kyle Chayka. Vox , December 17, 2019. 

The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media

YouTube is designed to catch you and not let go. Sometimes I access the site just to watch one thing, but then one of the related videos catches my eye. I watch that one, then another and another, and soon a five-minute visit has stretched far longer. If it’s half an hour of movie trailers, then I’m just indulging in a guilty pleasure. But what if I followed a link to “Q—The Plan to Save the World” and wound up staying for one outlandish conspiracy video after another? YouTube’s associative linking is designed to keep me clicking and watching. It has turned into a mechanism for political indoctrination, suggesting through sheer repetition that an international cabal is threatening to take over the world.

These false conspiracy theories can delude the public. But social media’s negative impact on the political process isn’t just a matter of their content—which includes, for example, intentional misinformation and hate speech directed toward ethnic and religious groups. The problem is also built into the structure of these digital applications.

Propaganda is nothing new; it has appeared in pamphlets, books, and newspapers practically since the invention of the printing press. But social media seem particularly susceptible to spreading disinformation. That’s because social media engage viewers in a way that designers call “flow,” a psychological idea adopted as a digital-design strategy by video games. Flow focuses on keeping the user moving from one element to the next, repetitively, in search of gratification from the act of consuming media rather than from engaging with its content.

When programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are used for political messaging, they bring flow along into the political process, even if the messages they carry are truthful and nonconspiratorial. That makes these media a threat to coherent political discourse from the age of print.

In the 1970s, the Hungarian American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi adopted the word flow to describe a state of engagement that arises when people are completely focused on an activity, such as tennis or rock climbing. Around the same time, the sociologist Raymond Williams also used the term to describe the way American television’s rhythm of programs and advertising is calculated to keep viewers watching hour after hour. More recently, flow has become a term of art in video-game design. Unlike television, games require interactivity, and designers try to keep the player in the “flow channel,” where the play is neither too difficult and frustrating nor too easy and boring. Social media combine the flow of television and the flow of video games to keep the user scrolling through post after post. The motivation here is obvious: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram only earn money if you stick around to view more ads. All flow media engage people through repetition and association. Ideally, for the businesses that run them, that engagement would be endless.

Social media sometimes feel addictive. But as entertainment, flow doesn’t seem like it would threaten the fabric of society. The problem arises because social media have also become a major platform for political information and discussion. According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of Americans received at least some of their news from social media in 2018. Both mainstream politicians and extremist groups use Facebook and Twitter to spread information.

Applied to politics, flow buries discussion about civic action under endless streams of text, images, and videos.

Let’s consider one of the clearest manifestations of the politics of flow: online conspiracy thinking, such as the kind spread by the movement QAnon. It flourishes not only on Facebook and Twitter, but also in the videos and channels of YouTube, and now on Instagram as well.

It works like this: An anonymous figure known as Q emits a stream of “data dumps” on the imageboard 8chan. These oracular pronouncements are then analyzed and spread by the QAnon group to a larger audience of readers and viewers. The dumps cluster around a core idea: that Donald Trump and some loyal followers in the military and government are engaged in a clandestine, existential struggle against an international cabal of evildoers. Q claimed to have discovered, for example, that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats were running an international child-sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington. “Pizzagate” was only the first of a series of improbable claims Q manufactured: Robert Mueller is actually working with Trump to expose the Democrats; Angela Merkel is the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler; and the Queen of England is part of the cabal.

As each new claim emerges, it is added to the network of conspiracies. There is no end to the process of interpreting Q dumps and adding new conspiratorial strands, especially because QAnon can simply incorporate contradictions and disappointments into its future messages when the predicted apocalypse doesn’t arrive. Q had predicted that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta would be arrested. When that didn’t happen, QAnon followers just incorporated it into the conspiracy. The false dates were designed, they claimed, to trick the cabal into complacency.

It might be wrong to call QAnon a conspiracy theory at all. In a recent study, the political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum distinguish between conspiracy theories and this new brand of conspiracism. Traditional conspiracy theories are relatively coherent narratives that seek to explain some disturbing aspect of the political or social world. The new conspiracism presents incoherent, often contradictory assertions rather than a consistent story.

Conspiracism flourishes on social media. In part that’s because it’s so easy to tweet or upload. But the flow-oriented structure of social media also fosters conspiracism. You can’t tell a coherent story in a 280-character tweet, but you can provide a tantalizing assertion or allude to shared story fragments, especially if you use code words and acronyms (such as QAnon’s WWG1WGA) or iconic images (such as the alt-right’s Pepe the Frog). Taking part in the QAnon conspiracism means learning how to read these codes and fragments, and perhaps eventually contributing to this flow with your own posts or videos.

Online conspiracism offers an extreme example of the politics of flow, but an obsession with streams of information instead of their content is also affecting the political mainstream. Donald Trump has become a consummate flow politician, and Twitter is his medium. During these first two years of his presidency, according to Trump’s Twitter Archive, he has tweeted more than 600 times about Russia and collusion, more than 400 times lamenting fake news, and more than 200 times each about Clinton and Obama. Often, the tweets carry a simple, emotional conclusion, such as “No Collusion” or “Just more Fake News.”

Taken together, the tweets embody a theme of personal grievance and betrayal. But they do not form a coherent or even consistent narrative. In the weeks after the release of the Mueller report, Trump declared the report both a total vindication and a hit job—in the same tweet. His supporters don’t seem to notice the contradictions. And his detractors might not notice either—the flow generates too much material for anyone to keep up with, even professional political analysts and reporters.

A presence on Twitter has become almost a job requirement for columnists and pundits. YouTube can also be a valuable educational resource with videos of political roundtables, academic conferences, lectures, and interviews. But the flow-oriented design of these media inhibits extended debate. When the liberal economist Paul Krugman tweeted a critique of the inconsistency of Republican policies on interest rates, for example, most of the more than 100 replies were simply derisive comments about Republican hypocrisy—posts created to derive pleasure from online riposte rather than advocacy for a particular position.

By contrast, blog posts and articles in online newspapers and magazines are not flow media; they are digital extensions of the kind of political writing that characterized printed newspapers and journals in the 19th and 20th centuries. There might be an opportunity for the readers to comment at the end of the article, but their responses do not contribute to flow and engagement in the same way. Even formal news and commentary often decays into flow fodder, such as when people post gut-feel responses to social media about articles they haven’t even read, based on the headline alone.

The politics of flow now poses a serious challenge to the earlier tradition of political debate. Some pundits have interpreted Trump’s populism as a realignment of the traditional political narratives of the left and the right. In both his presidential campaign and his presidency, Trump showed how easy it was to break both narratives into incendiary fragments that could be reshuffled into a variety of combinations. From the left he took opposition to international trade agreements and economic globalism; from the right, hostility to social programs and the federal bureaucracy (“drain the swamp”). On health care he managed to borrow from both left and right simultaneously, implying that he could repeal Obamacare (as conservatives fervently desired) and yet somehow replace it with something better and universal (that liberals had hoped for). He promised tax cuts and a large infrastructure program at the same time.

This was not a coherent agenda, but it works as a tweetable series of promises. Yet it was compelling to much of the American electorate, who no longer seemed to care about the coherence of political rhetoric. What mattered was that these promises all felt gratifying in the moment, addressing the feelings of grievance and betrayal that some citizens shared with Trump himself. That’s also why it doesn’t matter if the promises were kept, or if they contradicted with one another.

Trump’s opponents have had a hard time adjusting to this new order. In her 2016 campaign, Clinton was stymied by Trump’s unlikely candidacy and kept vacillating between presenting her complex agenda and attacking his lack of fitness for office. Trump has doubled down on flow politics since the election, tweeting thousands of times since his inauguration in 2017. The television and print-news media now broadcast and publish his and other politicians’ tweets, which they rarely did in the Obama years.

Flow isn’t just for conservatives, either. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise demonstrates that the politics of flow has a home on the left, too. AOC’s progressive agenda may be more coherent than Trump’s, but she is just as effective on Twitter. Like Trump, she understands how to use the platform to mobilize her 4 million followers in the moment. Last November, for example, she responded to a Fox News report on “radical new democratic ideas” by tweeting, “Oh no! They discovered our vast conspiracy to take care of children and save the planet.” Trump has many times more followers, but AOC’s tweets generate far more engagement (retweets, likes) per follower. When she arrived in Congress last year, AOC even gave a tutorial for fellow Democrats on the use of Twitter to connect with constituents.

She’s even more effective on Instagram, where her casual, personable approach to explaining policy in the context of her daily life wins huge engagement. Her fans see Instagram as an effective way to brand policy, such as the Green New Deal. But some worry that AOC’s Instagram success risks replacing political discussion, including the need to respond to challenges from the press, with social-media broadcasting.

AOC has a more coherent political agenda than Trump, and it’s tempting to say that she is using social-media platforms in the service of a more traditional political program. As a media-savvy young person, she sits between the two worlds. But even when used toward those ends, flow media still encourage a superficial, affective approach to politics that undermines traditional discourse.

The politics of flow likely will continue to redefine political discourse in our country. Flow makes video games and social-media sites more engaging, but the phenomenon might already have refashioned political discourse and permanently changed the institutions that depend on reasoned debate. And yet, flow’s engagement is so gratifying for so many, it’s difficult to let it go. Even if the public decided that the civic costs of social media outweigh the private pleasures, it might be too late, and too hard, to turn back. If it triumphs, the best we can hope for is a new breed of media-savvy AOCs with good ideas—and a sensitivity to the cost of expressing them in social-media form.

This post is adapted from Bolter’s new book, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media. (The MIT Press, 2019).

Social Media Are Ruining Political Discourse. By Jay David Bolter. The Atlantic, May 19, 2019. 

When the science fiction film Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman, came out in 2014, Wired called it “the best videogame you can’t play.” The film’s main character, Bill Cage, repeats the same day again and again—a day of futuristic combat with aliens. Each time he dies, Cage wakes up again on the previous day. Everything is as before, with the crucial difference that he remembers all the previous versions of that fatal next day. The repetitions are the film’s equivalent of a videogame’s replayability, and Cage’s battle skills improve, just as a player’s skills improve through replay. But Cage is not a player. He is a character in a narrative film, so the repeated days are in fact consecutive scenes in the film and thus take on a cumulative meaning. They tell a continuous story in which Cage gradually struggles to overcome the alien enemy and break out of the time loop. The film has a traditional narrative arc in which a relationship develops between the male and female leads as they fight the aliens together. In the final scene, with the alien threat defeated, Cage smiles. He has transcended replay, and the film can now resolve itself in typical Hollywood fashion. Film’s sense of an ending triumphs over the videogame.

This is how Edge of Tomorrow illustrates a tension in contemporary media culture. Hollywood still offers catharsis, as it has for decades, but it is both intrigued and concerned that videogames offer something else, a different aesthetic experience with its own strong appeal. Films like Edge of Tomorrow may appeal to some gamers, but it is clear that there are millions of players who prefer the mechanics of the videogame to the narrative, cathartic power of film. The Wired reviewer says of the romantic plot in Edge of Tomorrow: “the romantic subplot is probably necessary just because, you know, people like having feelings at movies, but still feels tacked on.” In fact, that romance is crucial to the emotional structure of Edge of Tomorrow as a Hollywood film.

Videogames’ economic importance is obvious. In 2015, revenues for videogames sales totaled $23.5 billion, and there are large communities of players whose media universe centers on videogames, not film or television. In the 20th century, film promoted itself as the preeminent popular medium, but the eroding of hierarchies now applies to film as it did earlier to the traditional elite arts. Film can no longer claim to perform a function for our whole culture when there is no whole. When Golden Age Hollywood promised to tell the story of our culture, it was usually the story of a cultural mainstream. Now it is even clearer that Hollywood’s promise is meaningful only to one, admittedly still large, audience in the plenitude.

New audiences, also in the millions, seek their cultural centers elsewhere—in videogames and social media. One of the principal pleasures offered by both videogames and social media is the experience of flow. Flow is an aesthetic principle for first-person shooter games, for platform games, for puzzle games. It is also the state induced by watching one YouTube video or Netflix episode after another or by monitoring Facebook feeds for hours on end. As early as the 1970s, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi applied the term “flow” to describe a particular state that he had identified in his subjects: “I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” Csikszentmihalyi’s flow can be evoked by activities common to many ages and cultures. He liked to cite rock climbing or tennis as examples—vigorous physical activities in which the participants lose track of time, fully engaged in the work of the moment. But he also argued that his flow state has something in common with forms of meditation or religious experience.

Still, many experiences go beyond Csikszentmihalyi’s definition. His definition of “flow” requires concentration: when you are climbing a rock face, you had better be fully focused on that task. For Csikszentmihalyi, listening in a focused way to someone playing the piano can induce flow, but playing the piano is a stronger flow experience. Our media culture today offers a variety of passive experiences that share a key characteristic with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow: the pleasure of losing oneself. The pleasure may be intense or muted. Playing a videogame can demand as much focus as playing the piano. Other digital media, like earlier media, demand less concentration. Watching YouTube videos one after another is like spending the evening watching sitcoms on a conventional TV set. Whether active or passive, all flow experiences simply … flow. They offer the viewer, player, or participant not only pleasure in the moment, but also the seductive possibility that the moment might go on indefinitely.

The game designer and evangelist Jane McGonigal believes that in order to solve global social and political problems we should all be playing more videogames. In her TED talk “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” she shows an image of a gamer who is about to achieve an “epic win.” The photo captures, she explains, “a classic games emotion … [a] sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem.” She claims that this intense concentration in a game can be harnessed for social change by turning real-world problems into collective online games. Whether we agree with her that videogames can change the world, McGonigal and many other writers on games are clearly right about the intensity of engagement that games can generate among dedicated players. It is the sense engagement that Csikszentmihalyi identified as flow.

Although videogames have a much shorter history than film, they have certainly developed as much diversity in the past 30 years. Genres (each with player bases in the millions or tens of millions) include: puzzle games, platform games, role-playing games, first-person shooters, and several others. If the classic way to enjoy a film is to sit in a darkened hall with an audience around you, absorbed in the light show on the large screen, the classic way to engage with a videogame is still to sit alone in front of a screen with your controller or keyboard. As digital writers constantly remind us, videogames are interactive, which means that through her participation, the player is subsumed into the procedural circuit of the game. In a first-person shooter, such as the Halo games or Half-Life 2, the player falls into a consistent frame of mind for relatively long periods, as she moves through each level and engages and kills enemies. A game may offer some pauses along the way, for example, with noninteractive, cinematic cutscenes; such scenes are felt as breaks in the flow that is the principal attraction in playing. But elaborate, nearly photorealistic shooters are certainly not the only games that pursue the aesthetic of flow. Platformer games (such as the Super Mario Brothers series) and puzzle games (Tetris, Bejeweled) also insert their players into a potentially endless event loop.

Although flow is by no means a new form of experience, our current media culture pursues the aesthetics of flow with particular enthusiasm. Videogames today enjoy an economic and cultural status far beyond that of traditional games or forms of play, and they are no longer a pastime only for adolescent boys. Some genres—for example, online “casual” games—are popular among women. They account for about 70 percent of the players of matching games like Tetris. In fact, 31 percent of all gamers are women, and the average age of women players is 37. Furthermore, game studies is now a recognized academic discipline with programs in major universities in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Videogames have also become “serious”: they are used in education and training, in the communication of health issues, and in politics for propaganda and for motivational purposes.

Videogames show us how digital media in general lend themselves easily to flow. For flow experiences often depend on repetitive actions, which contribute to the feeling of engagement and absorption that Csikszentmihalyi describes, and videogames—like all interactive computer interfaces, indeed like virtually all computer programs—operate on the principle of repetition. The user becomes part of the event loop that drives the action: her inputs to the controller, mouse, or keyboard are processed each time the computer executes the loop and are displayed as actions on the screen. The user not only experiences flow, she actually becomes part of the program’s flow. This is true, if in different ways, for applications throughout digital culture, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

The most prominent and popular social media platforms appeal to their hundreds of millions of users in part through the mechanism of flow. The stereotype, which contains some grain of truth, is that flow culture is youth culture. Young people spend their days immersed in flows of text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, and streaming music, while older adults prefer to experience their media one at a time. For example, a Pew Research survey from 2012 showed that almost half of all adults between ages 18 and 34 use Twitter, whereas only 13 percent of adults over age 55 do. The younger you are, the more likely you are to multitask: those born after 1980 do so more than Generation X, which does so much more than the baby boomers.

Each of the genres of social media provides a different flow experience. YouTube, for example, remediates television and video for the World Wide Web. A typical YouTube session begins with one video, which the user may have found through searching or as a link sent to her. The page that displays that video contains links to others, established through various associations: the same subject, the same contributor, a similar theme, and so on. Channel surfing on traditional television can be addictive, but the content of one channel tends to have little to do with that of the next. YouTube’s lists of links and its invitation to search for new videos give the viewer’s experience more continuity, with the opportunity to watch an endless series of close variants.

Like other microblogging sites, Twitter offers each user a personalized stream of short messages from all the posters that the user has chosen to follow—including personal friends, celebrities, news organizations, companies, and nonprofits. If she follows enough sources, her stream of messages will change as fast as she can refresh her screen. As with YouTube, but far more easily, she can contribute to the conversation by “retweeting” the messages of others or writing her own. The resulting stream is an unpredictable combination of public and private communication. Twitter interleaves the messages from all the sources so that there is no coherence between consecutive messages and no need for the process ever to end. Those trained in traditional rhetorical practices may find the individual tweets and the whole stream almost meaningless. But for Twitter regulars, the rhythm of short texts is satisfying in its own right.

Multimedia microblogs such as Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat privilege images and audio, and each platform offers a subtly different version of flow. Snapchat enforces a staccato rhythm by making its photo messages, “snaps,” necessarily ephemeral. The stated purpose is to encourage playfulness among senders and recipients and to counteract the tendency to treat social media services as a permanent record of your online identity. It might seem that Snapchat enables you to lose yourself in the moment without having to regret the next day the selfie that you took in that moment, but it is possible for the recipient to make and save a screenshot. You may lose yourself in the social media plenitude, but others can almost always find you.

Take note of the fact that social media as flow experiences are therapeutic, helping an individual to negotiate her relationship to her social world. Csikszentmihalyi himself ascribed a therapeutic value to flow experiences. He suggested that in a secular and often hostile world, flow gives individuals a feeling of control in their own smaller domains (games, hobbies, work activities). Flow becomes “the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life.” Csikszentmihalyi’s flow culture is one in which individuals aim at nothing higher than personal satisfaction. The psychology of flow does not encourage them to think of themselves as actors in a larger social or political drama. At least from 1800 to the end of the 20th century, politically aware citizens were encouraged to see their own history as marked by the same dramatic curve as that of their state or nation. Flow culture does not endorse such a view. Instead, the identity constructed on Facebook and YouTube is static or homeostatic: its modest goal is to keep itself within bounds, within the channels provided by a Facebook page.

Adapted from The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media by Jay David Bolter (The MIT Press, 2019).

How the Videogame Aesthetic Flows Into All of Culture. By Jay David Bolter. Wired ,  May 7 , 2019

There was a time when bien pensant middle-class people would get enormously exercised over what could and couldn’t count as ‘art’. The last century was periodically punctuated by such debates, from the avantgardist provocations of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp to the 1990s heydays of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. If today’s bourgeoisie seem nobly indifferent to such questions, this is, according to Jay David Bolter, because the sheer superabundance of cultural production in the digital age is rendering the arts increasingly unpoliceable: since ‘there is no elite whose position on art validates the significance for the rest of us, there is less at stake.’

In his new book, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media, published last month by MIT Press, Bolter contends that the infrastructure of cultural gatekeeping has been destabilized, its critical hierarchies disrupted if not quite razed, in a media ecology where online fan fiction shares equal billing with the literary canon. He believes this is, on balance, a positive development: the cultural landscape is vastly more pluralistic than it once was, and ‘this wealth of opportunity seems [...] to more than compensate for the loss of a single cultural centre and set of universally shared standards’. This appealing thesis requires some qualification. It is a little premature to proclaim the disintegration of mainstream culture: try telling anyone who has followed the recent buzz around Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series Fleabag (2016–19) that we no longer have water-cooler moments. As for the flattening of hierarchies, any cultural historian will tell you it was underway long before the internet came along.

Undoubtedly, the internet has had a transformative effect on the dissemination, consumption and criticism of traditional art forms such as music, film and literature. But this is probably the least interesting aspect of its impact on culture. The most thought-provoking sections of The Digital Plenitude explore how digital technology is reinventing art itself, birthing new forms. Bolter, who is a professor of New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, reminds us that information technology was initially thought of as a mere storage tool before it gradually morphed into a medium in its own right. Today, he observes, ‘art and media are [...] the same thing’; ‘Participatory fansites, DIY communities [...] the remixes of YouTube, and the template-bound self-expression of social networking sites all testify to a new conception of creativity as a synonym for art.’

Bolter invokes two technical terms that seek to capture the aesthetic sensibility of the digital age: ‘procedurality’ and ‘flow’. ‘Procedurality’ denotes the rules-bound, process-driven logic of a computer program, whose narrative arc sits outside the normal rules of time and space. This is best exemplified by the experience of the video-game player, who inhabits ‘an infinitely repayable present’ in which ‘simulation replaces history’. ‘Flow’ is a term originally coined in 1975 by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to denote a state of immersive, energized focus in an activity. Bolter applies it to a 21st-century context to describe the state of happy, scrolling stupor wherein the user of a digital app – be it a social media platform or an interactive game – ‘simply wants the experience to continue at a more or less constant rhythm’. Whereas the dominant narrative mode of analogue-era culture was characterized by ‘catharsis’ – a film or novel builds towards a climax, framed within a finite structure whose basic contours are immanent in the linearity of the codex – ‘procedurality’ and ‘flow’ entail a subjective experience that is qualitatively different in texture.

  

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s dictum in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that culture is ultimately shaped by the technological evolution of media, Bolter suggests we are witnessing the inception of a new cultural paradigm comparable to the advent of modernism in the early 20th century: ‘While modernism was vitally concerned with the cultural meaning of mechanical and power technologies in the 20th century, today’s media culture is exploring how far procedurality and simulation can penetrate into and redefine creative expression as well as our politics and everyday lives.’

The arts, as we have hitherto known them, are changing before our very eyes. And yet, as Bolter acknowledges, the codex – and its attendant sensibility – hasn’t died. Far from it: the book publishing industry is in rude health and ‘cathartic [i.e. traditional] film and television are flourishing’. These forms are not in terminal decline, but their primacy is a thing of the past; they now comprise one facet of an unprecedentedly heterogeneous landscape. The past and the future are peacefully co-existing in the present.

The Decline of Elite Culture. By Houman Barekat. Frieze ,  May 14, 2019.