The Year Monoculture Died

At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper posed for a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a host of A-listers, including Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. It was posted on DeGeneres’ Twitter account soon after, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time.

The selfie was an instant viral moment in a telecast that got the Academy Awards the largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people. The photo (with Cooper using a phone made by Samsung, a major sponsor of the Oscars) became a day’s news cycle in itself.

No one knew it at the time, but in retrospect the selfie moment feels like the last stand of a shared popular culture that no longer exists. The monoculture didn’t die with Cooper’s selfie, but that night may have been its last peak.

The idea of ​​a monoculture is not a completely sensible one, obviously – words like “guarding the gate” and “dumbing” can be substituted for it. And the nostalgia of the meaning of the rose color. But in a fragmented world – politically, socially, algorithmically – where technological tools have the ability to make people question the truth itself, and in an industry that has seen the one-time pillars of creativity reduced (at least possibly) to the tiles of another company’s landing page, the idea of ​​a widely shared pop culture language feels almost romantic.

To rewind a little: At the time of the Oscar selfie in 2014, social media flourished, and traditional and online media outlets reaped the benefits of an ecosystem where a favored post on Facebook could generate tens of thousands of clicks (the “pivot of video” that would end everything was still a year away). Virality often comes in the form of BuzzFeed or Upworthy posts with “What happened next will blow your mind” headlines, a style that is quickly copied across the web. Live-tweeting games (all of which are on broadcast or cable TV), major news events or just an episode of American Idol is a way to communicate in real time with a few dozen (or a few thousand) of your friends and followers.

The Oscars weren’t the only big thing that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets may be at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in nearly 21 million. The Emmy Awards in August 2014 had 15.59 million viewers on NBC – down 12 percent from 2013 but still a healthy audience. Five other music awards appeared that year that brought in at least 10 million viewers.

The regular series also improved. In the 2013-14 TV season, two dozen network and cable shows, from The Walking Dead on Downton Abbeyaveraged 12 million or more viewers; the first two (The Big Bang Theory and NCIS) have more than 22 million each and even primetime NFL games after a week of DVR play.

Streaming isn’t really a thing yet. Netflix made a splash in 2013 with its first original series, House of Cardsbut most of the industry still considers it “Albanian army“as the CEO of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, did not care about the company in 2010. (Time Warner, in fact, was still a few years away from its merger with AT&T, which began the cascade that eventually led to its imminent absorption by Paramount Skydance.) When the Oscars were broadcast on March 2, 2014 on Netflix, a total streaming of Amazon in 2014. Video.

Heck, even the idea of ​​the selfie was relatively new at the time. The term has been around since the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until Apple installed a front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 in 2010 that they really took off. Facebook acquired the two-year-old Instagram, already a repository of millions of selfies, in 2012 but at least kept its promise to let the app grow on its own. The Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year for 2013, about four months before the Oscars.

The pop culture revolution didn’t happen all at once, of course. The back half of the 2010s had many shared touchstones – from nearly $5 billion in worldwide box office to the last two. Avengers movies to many viewers for Game of Thrones‘ last seasons and stratospheric sales figures for music artists like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Adele. But the cracks in the monolith are clearly showing.

If awards shows are a proxy for what people — the people who make the stuff nominated for the awards and the public who consumes it — are dialed in at any given time, then our collective attention span continues to slip over time. None of the major awards telecasts has reached its 2014 audience numbers in the 12 years since. The Oscar broadcast is still typically the biggest non-sports primetime show of the year on a broadcast network, but that now means 18 million or more viewers than 40 million-plus. The Grammys (14.41 million viewers in 2026) and other awards shows similarly fell.

Traditional TV audiences are also fragmented. Today, you can find some networks that show that, thanks mostly to streaming, can compete with the total audience from 12 years ago. But where there used to be 24 network and cable shows with 12 million or more viewers over seven days, now there are only three (CBS’ Marshals and Tracker and ABC High Potential).

The explosion of choices made possible by streaming (of both filmed media and music) has made it less and less likely that a large group of people will be watching or listening to the same things at the same time. Netflix’s rapid growth into a major player – it released more than 60 English-language scripted series in 2019 (and many more unscripted movies, documentaries and imports) – was a spark that led some cable and satellite subscribers to cut the cord, which in turn led traditional media giants such as Disney, Time Warner and NBCUniversal to abandon their still profitable businesses (but earlier) than a decade.

Disney CEO Bob Iger signaled the start of a streaming arms race to catch up with Netflix in August 2017, when he announced a “significant strategic shift” at the company towards developing what would be the first Disney+ and ESPN offerings.

Disney+ and Apple TV+ launched in 2019. HBO Max and Peacock followed in 2020, while Hulu, Prime Video and CBS All Access — which will become Paramount+ in 2021 — are also scaling. In 2019, 532 English-language scripted series aired or streamed in the United States, per FX’s annual count, which was previously an all-time high.

Then 2020 begins with a pandemic that causes the collapse of monoculture. As people spend months or even longer away from shared spaces, shared experiences also diminish – at least of the kind experienced outside of our mobile devices. Third season of Ozark and the rubbernecking scene that is Tiger King both were launched by Netflix when the lockdowns took hold, and they were huge.

But with hundreds of film and TV productions also closed for long periods of time, YouTube, TikTok and other social media are beginning to consume more of people’s media time, and no one’s algorithm should serve the same content as others. That’s by design, of course — content that’s personalized, or at least feels that way, is what keeps us glued to our handheld screens or, worse, lets the “next game” ticker serve up another YouTube video on our TVs.

Scrolling, or its passive larger-screen version, has become the have-it-in-the-background program of choice at the expense of, say, daytime soap operas and talk shows, whose numbers have dwindled over the past decade with audience decline.

Pinpointing a time when shared culture began to give way is clearly an exercise in perspective. As you can see, there are a lot of collective experiences in this era – Super Bowls, the Eras Tour, the end of Stranger Thingseven something like Project Hail Mary’s unexpectedly ran at the box office.

Still, the view can be powerful – the adage about not remembering the past and being condemned to repeat it has some truth, after all. The idea of ​​shared pop culture as common language may seem like it’s in the rearview mirror now, or some may be writing an essay in 2038 looking back at how much more cohesive things were a decade-plus earlier.