I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the exact opposite is happening, that the long tail has exploded and the most popular shows/movies/books/songs

I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the exact opposite is happening, that the long tail has exploded and the most popular shows/movies/books/songs no longer have the same universal appeal. Mainstream culture is experiencing death by multiverse, where every genre and subgenre is filled with an endless supply of content and the shared media diet that defined American culture is for the most part dead. I was going to write a counter-counter-culture bit eulogizing that shared media landscape, but the fact is media is not culture. Culture has existed long before media, and is much larger than that. Shallow similarities like watching the same shows cannot replace loving one another.