Last summer, you could barely walk down the street without coming across someone in head-to-toe pink shouting “Hi, Barbie!” to a friend nearby or stumbling across a group enthusiastically discussing their “Barbenheimer” double feature. For the first time in what felt like a long time, it seemed like everyone was watching and talking about the same things, meaning we all understood the cultural reference points and the sometimes clever jokes and could jump into the middle of a conversation with ease. As I vigorously debated why “I’m Just Ken” was the superior Barbie soundtrack song, I realized that I had missed this sense of community around pop culture—this sense that people everywhere were enjoying exactly what I was.
In cultural writing, this “sense” brought about by entertainment is often referred to as “monoculture,” although that’s an imperfect, complicated term. After all, as Lainey Lui, eTalk senior correspondent and founder of celebrity blog Lainey Gossip, points out, a movie that feels universal to a twentysomething woman from Toronto may not even blip on the radar of someone in, say, Japan. But my general sentiment is still something being felt by many: Have we lost our communal pop-culture experience—those water-cooler moments where you could strike up a conversation with someone and be confident that you were on an equal footing?
“The answer to that is yes and no,” says Lui. “If we’re looking back to the days when a TV show like M*A*S*H was pulling in, what, 70 million viewers or more? Then sure, by those metrics, that was monoculture—everyone had to watch the same thing because there were only, like, three channels. In today’s time, with so many options to get your entertainment from, of course not everyone is going to watch or listen to the same thing.”
But that doesn’t mean that community can’t still be found. When artists like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift drop new music, the frenzied conversation around it is inescapable, whether you count yourself as a fan or not. And if you are a fan, chances are your social-media algorithms have been perfectly fine-tuned to fill your feeds with content from fellow Swifties 24-7, which can be its own version of all-consuming (digital) water-cooler-worthy monoculture. “I wonder, on a cellular level, if it feels that way for a Swiftie today,” says Lui. “For all intents and purposes, everyone in their world is talking about the same thing.”