Has the Mainstream Run Dry?

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The year 2003 introduced a new phrase to the cultural vocabulary: flash mob, an instant gathering of people, organized on the Internet, who receive an e-mail or cell-phone message, show up en masse at a designated spot, perform some absurd act (quack like ducks, bang their shoes on the pavement) and then disperse.

Mainstream culture today is like a flash mob. Those who are part of it know they're part of it, even if it doesn't congregate as often as it did back when 30 million people would watch a network show on a typical night. Every so often, we get the call we gather for Joe Millionaire or buy that Harry Potter book. Then, show over, book read, we scatter: back to VH1 or our Scarface DVDS or our scrapbooking chat rooms.

Increasingly, the events that most deeply, if briefly, unite that floating mainstream are deaths: Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, Katharine Hepburn. The intensity of response to the passing of John Ritter, a likable actor from a campy '70s sitcom, seemed to surprise even his fans. In a culture with few common cultural referents, the past is what we share the most. (Perhaps for the same reason, 2003's Broadway shows with broad mass appeal tended to be revivals like Long Day's Journey into Night and Wonderful Town and the music business heaved up a slew of standards albums.) When old stars pass, they take with them a piece of a time when we weren't so niched and subdivided by the market and our own choices. To make the metaphor a little homier, the pop-culture mainstream is a family that used to get together for dinner once a week but now does so only at weddings (or dating-show finales, anyway)--and funerals.

But don't mourn those old days. However community-building the old big aggregators were (the three networks, Top 40 radio), they also tended to kill idiosyncrasy (with a few hard-fought exceptions like Cash). That cable serves smaller audiences allowed it this year to produce more polarizing but better TV: FX's Nip/Tuck, ESPN's Playmakers, HBO's Angels in America. (Though, granted, as the debate over the FCC's media-ownership rules noted, most of the open mouths providing those voices are still connected to the corporate lungs of a few giant media companies.) And if iPod users pick and choose singles rather than pay $18 for filler-loaded albums (which were invented more for business than artistic reasons in the first place), it frees them to sample more genres and artists. The trade-off is a flightier, more mercurial and more tabloid pop culture. Its one unifying trait, perhaps, is simply the desire to check out what all the fuss is about. But at least we're still connected enough to care about one another's fusses now and again.

The monolithic mainstream culture of the 20th century helped define what it meant to be American. But it was un-American at heart. The phrase E pluribus unum aside, America was founded on fragmentation by people fleeing religious, political and cultural "community" in the Old World. Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that a strength of the new nation was its abundance of space. Here, unlike in Europe, the citizens could be united when they needed to and be alone when they wanted to. In an older, more crowded America, we find that space virtually inside a screen, a book, a set of headphones. This is our last frontier, and it goes on forever.