What is your Horizon of Interest?

Pop Culture is anything that comes from mass media.

Mass media as a concept can be arguably traced to Antiquity, but the modern manifestation, which was nurtured in coffee houses in the Enlightenment, came to fruition around 1850 in the form of middle class newspapers with reportage that was transmitted by telegraph. This allowed a greatly expanded horizon of interest for the consumers of the medium.

When mass media was manifest in print, it resulted in a certain type of society. The first mass media era was synonymous with the rise of Liberal politics in both Britain and the continent, with radical manifestations at times which were echoes of the French Revolution, in the form of romantic appeals to the masses and to the people.

The most skillful user of mass media in that era was arguably Abraham Lincoln.

The print-only mass media era came to the end with the introduction of audio-visual mass media, in the form of printed sheet music and the first wave of silent motion pictures. Sound recordings soon followed.

The Pop Culture that would come to dominate the Twentieth Century was born around 1927, with the introduction of nationwide radio networks. The Great Communicators of the mid Twentieth Century were those that thrived in this medium. Nationwide radio broadcasts elevated actors and athletes into the horizon of interest of people in a way unknown in western culture since Antiquity, outside of certain courts of Europe. It was experienced by its participants as generally democratic.

Nationwide black and white television broadcasts came in 1947. Television usurped radio in importance, although radio would have be important for the propagation of recorded music.

The national networks were fully colorized by 1965. Apparently this was among the most significant of evolutions, as it was accompanied by radical Pop Culture repudiation of previous era, during the years up to 1970. This epoch has been considered by at least one eminent historian of the Establishment as the birth of an entire new civilization, which we can identify as with the full emergence of Postmodernity.

The culture this produced (nationwide television broadcast of both drama and news, coupled with nationally radio-distributed Pop Music) is the American Pop Culture familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s.

In 1980s, America transitioned to a cable-television-based mass media, the first radical manifestation of which was MTV around 1981-1982, which resulted in the culture of the 1980s.

By the 1990s, cable television news broadcasts became the most important vector of Pop Culture transmission. This produced the Clinton Era.

The web came into public consciousness around 1995, but it was not until about 2005 that we entered an era in which the Internet as a whole was the dominant public vector of mass media, with all other forms of media subordinate to it. Since 2015, we have lived in the dominance of social media, it having usurped even television.

Much of the current strife in Pop Culture can be seen as a rearguard action by the certain segments of Pop Culture to retain their status amidst a declining position of influence overall.