New Media, New Culture

    The expression of culture is created and bolstered through the media.  This conveyor of culture and tool of mass communication helped facilitate popular culture.  As Deanna Sellnow states, “popular culture is significant because it has the persuasive power to shape beliefs and behaviors.”  Popular culture exists where communication technologies can facilitate it; namely, when generally organized messaging and meaning-making can happen on a large scale.  Mass media communication and pop culture are so inherent to one another that they become the chicken or egg quandary. 

               With developments from the printing press to the radio, changes in communication technologies create significant shifts in culture.  With the arrival of New Media, the mainstream, or mass-media lost its hold on being the primary officiator of culture.  Instead of choosing between mainstream media and alternative media, people now have their infinite-seeming choice of cultural influences, represented in the cultural artifact of scrolling.  Engagement is offered in place of consumption, and rapport builds a following instead of institutional self-validity.  The reach and engagement aspects of social media have brought more people to the medium than any other mass media before it.

               The power of any new media’s influence on culture is as grand as any communication technology could allow.  Not only is the mass of people reached increased, but so is the number of cultural worldviews influencing one another.  More subcultures, niche communities, and micro-trends emerge with the growth of the creator culture that is promoted in social media.  People have more of a direct hand in meaning-making and culture creation, and access to influence and persuade others.  Cultural worldviews can be more nuanced and varied from the myriads of influences possible, while simultaneously weakening in the cultural unity that came before.  A key component of power is the ability to control preferred meanings that are widely shared.  Old media kept information centralized, credentialed, and disseminated through order.  Social media and new media decentralize cultural means of production which disturbs the mechanisms through which pop-culture is created. 

               Social media itself has declared the death of pop culture; searching “post pop-culture” on X retrieves plenty of cultural texts affirming this ideology. Several videos and responses echo the idea that “pop culture peaked and has been collapsing ever since,” calling the current time “America’s pop-culture Armageddon” where we are “now *firmly* in post-civilization.”  “Everything now is a rehash or a remaster, trying to recapture the nostalgic feeling of a world that’s gone.”  Is the notion that pop culture has become a cultural artifact of the past evidence that new media has fundamentally changed cultural meaning-making, or is it simply a reflection of a fractured culture?