考研阅读精选：单一化
『媒体形式的多样化，使人们能接触到主流文化之外的多种文化，这是否会削弱主流文化对人们的凝聚作用？』Making the Monoculture
Oct 16th, 2011 | From The Economist
THE proliferation of media, enabled by the internet and the newconsumer devices that access it, has also driven the decentralization ofmedia. As recently as 15 years ago, if you wanted to catch up on thenews, you could look at a handful of publications or a few nightlyprogrammes. And if you wanted to listen to music, you could turn on MTVor fiddle with your radio. People in major cities had more options,because a large population can support specialty shops, but in vastswathes of the world you had to work to get outside the mainstream.
Today, as we all know, access to information has exploded. Oneconsequence, according to Touré, a cultural critic writing in Salon, isthat the ability of pop culture to unify us—he refers to the massiveinterest in Michael Jackson"s Thriller, or Nirvana's Nevermind—has beeneroded, probably forever. Steven Hyden counters that whatever theadvantages and disadvantages of a centralised pop-culture authority, themonoculture never actually existed.
I think Mr Hyden iscorrect that the concept of a "monoculture" is a bit of a myth. Evenwhen it supposedly existed, its content largely depended on othercharacteristics of your little corner of the world. In the 1992-1993school year, I was a student at a multiracial and relatively urbanjunior high school in California's central valley. We listened toSalt-n-Pepa, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Kris Kross, with the latter havinginspired a trend in which kids wore their clothes backwards. The nextyear I was enrolled in a mostly white junior high school in leafyChicago suburb. One of the houses was famous for having appeared in the1990 film "Home Alone"; the popular bands were Nirvana, Hole and theSmashing Pumpkins; and the biggest pop-cultural event of the school yearwas Kurt Cobain's suicide.
But Toure's point is about thevirtues of common cultural experience. It seems he's reminiscing aboutcentralised media only insofar as it's a distribution system thatfostered that outcome. And it's true that the ways we now consume popculture to some extent level the playing field. It doesn't matterwhether a record is released by an important label or an indie: if it'sonline, people can usually find, forward, share and promote it. Butwhat's interesting—and perhaps surprising, given that both Touré and MrHyden seem to agree that the old distribution favoured big media—is thatwe still have widely shared cultural experiences. This summer KatyPerry, a pop singer, tied Michael Jackson's record for having five #1singles from the same album (Teenage Dream in Ms Perry's case, and Badin Jackson's). Or think of Barack Obama doing the little hand gesturefrom Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video.
That suggests that welike pop culture partly because it's a shared experience, regardless ofquality. This seems to be a feature that is burnished by nostalgia andreinforced by additional rounds of criticisms and analysis. So it may bethat the things we think of as part of a previous era's monoculturewere actually merely popular at the time. We can argue that Nevermindwas the most influential album of 1991, or the best, but it wasn't asbig as Garth Brooks's Ropin' the Wind. In Britain in 1995 Oasis released(What's the Story) Morning Glory?; Radiohead released The Bends; Pulp,Different People; Blur, The Great Escape. Each of these albums holds uppretty well and has plenty of fans. But the biggest-selling album inBritain that year was Robson & Jerome's self-titled debut. It's safeto say that the monoculture never really existed, and that some artistsstill reach a wide audience, whether we like it or not.（672 words）
文章地址：http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/10/popular-concerns-0
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