Mass culture on the skids Beyond the skids, actually, and on the verge of extinction. So says Reed Johnson of the LA Times in Mass media's last blast, his not-so-fond obituary for the collective pop/mass culture "[b]orn sometime between the invention of baseball and the 1904 World's Fair" that finally "lapsed into a coma during the launch of MySpace.com."
A decade into the Age of the Graphic Browser Interface, Americans seldom are focused on the same event or activity at the same moment. But they're congregating in enormous numbers on websites and other high-tech portals that function much like the institutions they've nudged aside. The culture's being boutiqued or, as the expression goes, "unbundled." Broadcast has given way to a proliferation of narrowcasts. (More...)
Hmmm. So I should think of this blog as a boutique, I suppose.
Link via a man who keeps his blog firmly on the pulse of technoculture, Brad Boydston.