Does the rise of the Long Tail mean the fall of mass culture?
The short answer is that mass culture will not only get less mass, but that this is a trend that’s already well underway. Let’s start by defining mass culture. The usual test is the”watercooler effect,” the buzz in the office around a shared cultural event, be it the finale of The Apprentice or the opening of the last Star Wars. The number of such events has been shrinking for years, driven mostly by the fragmentation of the television audience. Cable TV started this with its explosive increase in the number of shows broadcast at any one time, which soon resulted in half of American viewership moving to cable. The arrival of TiVo and other DVRs amplified this by taking the time component out, too. The result is that the day when most of America watched the same things on the same night is long gone. Today’s top shows have Nielsen scores that wouldn’t have put them in the top 20 two decades ago. Likewise for music. By my count only ten of the top 100 best-selling albums were released in
