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There are two stories here, a business one and a cultural one. The business one should not deeply interest you unless you were hoping a Hollywood mogul would buy you a Hummer for Christmas this year. But the cultural story is about all of us--the Whitmanian, immigrant America of contradictory multitudes. Americans do not have a shared ethnic past or state religion. We have Jessica Simpson. Once, when tens of millions of people listened to the same summer hits, watched the same sitcoms and cried together in movie houses, the mass media defined what mainstream meant--what ideals we valued, how much change we would tolerate. If it's harder and harder to define mainstream pop culture, is there a mainstream at all?
Of course, no sooner had the printing press been invented than some pundit was probably bemoaning how people, individually consuming those newfangled "books," would lose the community spirit engendered by Passion plays and witch burnings. And it's worth remembering that mass culture was a 20th century anomaly. Before film and broadcasting, the idea of a giant country, much less the world, sharing a common culture was ludicrous. Travel 100 miles or so, and you'd encounter different dialects, values and folkways. Even religion could spread only so far before being locally amended by, say, a king needing a quickie divorce. Mass culture flattened out dialects and provided new Americans with a quick if superficial means of assimilation. But it developed only because the technology for mass communication was invented before the technology for mass choice. In the late 1940s some 80% of TVs tuned in to Texaco Star Theater because, yes, Milton Berle was funny but in part too because not much else was on.
But if mass media was a technological accident, it was also an idea, in synch with other ideas of its time. It was part of the mid-20th century age of bigness, centralization and consolidation--Big Government, the draft, central cities, UNIVACs, lifetime employment and evil empires you could find on a map. And its decline is in synch with a world that is increasingly decentralized, atomized and a la carte--tax revolts, the volunteer "Army of One," suburbs, the Web, job hopping and stateless terrorism.