"For as long as the internet has been around, the story of media has been one of fragmentation and atomization."

"Thanks to all these new formats, new business models, and new distribution technologies, we’ve been drowning in an unprecedented level of choice in movies, music, TV shows, books and, especially, sources of news. As a result, everything is personalized and polarized — we’re all split into social-media-selected tribes, where our consumption of news and culture feels constantly shaped by a privacy-invading algorithmic determination of one’s innermost sense and sensibility. And yet, in the last few years, something counterintuitive has been happening with mass media: It’s been getting more mass.... Across the cultural industries, blockbusters are getting blockbustier: Despite the barrage of choice, more of us are enjoying more of the same songs, movies and TV shows. We are not nearly as siloed as we tend to think we are.... While the internet has made a mess of our politics, it’s starting to do something remarkable for our culture businesses...."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "This Summer Stinks. But at Least We’ve Got 'Old Town Road'/Lil Nas X’s smash single shows how digital media is creating a shared global culture in an otherwise atomized age" (NYT).

Do you agree with that — the internet has made a mess of our politics, but it's doing something remarkable for our culture businesses? I'd say, first of all, the "more" in "more of us are enjoying more of the same" is less when you're looking at songs, movies, and TV shows than it is when you're talking about politics. The same song has been #1 since last March, but what percentage of Americans love it enough to enjoy seeing it maintain this conspicuousness? Probably less than the number that loves having Donald Trump as President.

Politics involves much more consensus, fine-tuning the same issues. Substantively, it's boring. And yet it's required. Whether you participate or not, the power that will be exercised will be over you too. Music and movies and TV can be completely fragmented, and you can pay attention to anything you want and ignore whatever you want, and the effect, if any, is diffuse and mostly indirect. When we come together at all over a song/movie/TV show it feels special. It feels like unity. But it was entirely voluntary and we're free to disperse at will. And that seeming unity wasn't even a majority. Politics demands that we come together, en masse, over and over, about dealing with problems that — unlike songs — don't have an off switch.