Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultural inputs as you tends towards zero.
Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.
I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics).
There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You should be able to connect with people without any common cultural artifacts. People are interesting.
> You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts.
You can, of course. You're missing or ignoring the implication that one can have any kind of expectation about connecting with an arbitrary individual.
Personally, I think this is for the positive: acknowledging that you can't expect to connect with everyone seems healthy.
To me it seems like walking back on all the moral progress we've achieved. Today you don't expect it's possible to connect with everyone, tomorrow you deny humanity to anyone you can't imagine yourself connecting to.
I think it also depends on what kind of connections you want.
As somebody that really values comedy and a sense of humor, it becomes very obvious that humor is particularly dependent on having shared cultural references. For me, if a new relationship doesn’t having the touchstones that allow joking around it feels empty and sterile
I suppose this might be related to nerd culture decades ago. Scifi, fantasy and comic books for example were much more niche, you would be ostracized or ridiculed for showing interested in them openly. That was before those genres were appropriated by the mainstream. Before that, nerds would (with great effort) seek out other nerds in order to share the same appreciation for the hyper specific interests they had.
Now the average person discovered the joy of such hyper specific content, instead of the same lowest most common denominator mainstream shit. But it's also generational, older generations are very much constrained in their cultural consumption. What you described hasn't happened yet I don't think, but it might once everyone who still watches TV is dead.
Yes, well done, the canon is winning the most amount of scorn from academics, HOWEVER. The desire for quality will outlive them all, including big tent slop and long-tail slop.
Tentpole stuff like Harry Potter is the only thing saving us from complete societal atomization where everybody is a stranger.