My previous post, on whether TV is (or is not) better than movies, touched a little on the issue of true popularity. To be specific: What’s the difference between mass entertainment and niche entertainment?
I don’t want to relitigate this, so much as go back and point out a few elements and highlight some previous posts on this topic.
What I refer to as niche audiences might more properly be referred to as cultural/social subgroups: older people, skateboarders, classical music listeners, Italian Americans in New Jersey, etc.
I’ll quote briefly from Dick Hebdige’s 1981 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, an influential book I mentioned here:
…we are interested in subculture – in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups – the teddy boys and mods and rockers, the skinheads and the punks – who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonized…
…the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture – in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning.
Hebdige was primarily focused on the punk scene of England in the Seventies. The impact of subculture has completely changed due to the Internet. In this post, I mentioned Patton Oswalt’s argument that geek culture is over, because all the ephemera is available online. I disagreed – not everything is available – but it is true that people have confused the differences between mass and niche content because of the Internet.
In the old days, the things you were interested in – Japanese manga or David Axelrod albums – were hard to obtain. Once you had them, if might be even harder to find someone to share your fandom with. There was no way you were going to be confused about the fact that this was niche content. These days, it’s easy to fool yourself that everybody’s into what you’re into.
As I wrote here:
A viral video that draws one million views is a big deal, but a network show with one million viewers is a huge disaster… Facebook has more than 200 million members, but Twitter (which comScore said had 9.3 million visitors in March [2009]) gets all the buzz.
If you just listened to Twitter or the blogosphere, you’d think Battlestar Galactica was the most significant show, but it’s American Idol that’s a huge hit.
The lines between “mass” and “niche” are completely confusing to people. Which is odd, because it ought to be a very objective issue: Things consumed in large numbers (based on ratings or ticket sales) are “mass” and things consumed in small numbers are “niche.”
But as I wrote here, in a post about what makes things “elite,” it sometimes seems like people see the things they (and the members of their cohort) consume as “mass,” while the things off their radars are “niche.”
You sometimes see this reflected in the media. For example, in 2006, I dinged Caitlin Flanagan for her sweeping generalizations:
It goes like this: “I went to summer camp every year for 13 years and it was great; therefore, every kid ought to go.” Or “I was forced to go to summer camp once and it was horribly traumatic — no child should go.” Or “Some of my friends have been doing this activity, so it’s sweeping the nation.” Your experience is your own. That’s great. It may or may not represent what’s going on in the larger community. The way to prove it is through evidence, not anecdotes.
When you watch some low-rated show on television and you also read discussion on the Internet about the show and, at the same time, you’re connecting, via social media, with other fans, you think the whole world is into the same thing as you. Thirteen episodes later, your favorite show get cancelled. Some “crappy” program that none of your friends and acquaintances watch is the highest-rated show on television. It’s been running for eleven seasons.
All that’s fine. We can live in our little cocoons and consume what we want. We just ought to be clear about how popular that stuff is.
[Keeping in mind everything I just wrote, now analyze this article on some current television shows. You see what I mean?]