Read the top 10 list, and I haven’t heard of any of these shows.
Is the world segregating such that there are fewer shared activities in a community to talk about?
Growing up 30 years ago, everybody knew the top 5 TV shows even if you didn’t watch them: they were the topic of conversations or at least listed in thr “TV guides”
> Is the world segregating such that there are fewer shared activities in a community to talk about?
Yes very much so. I'll notice it mostly on google news. For many things I search for, Google News starts to show me articles on that topic. If I look up an event, restaurant or movie the topic then becomes a regular topic in my Google News page. It makes the topic feel bigger than it is, and of course, crowds out other topics so that I'm not hearing about them.
This is a good articulation of something I've noticed more and more recently with Google News. I used to feel like I was getting a broad overview of the news of the day by browsing it... Increasingly it feels like a filter bubble constructed just for me, which is unsettling and not that useful to me. I suppose it's time to seek out other sources of news aggregation.
>And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.
I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.
It's more common water cooler talking points. Like the superbowl, the reality is, most people have shallow investment in the shared culture. You get proficient making small talk on popular topics that doesn't really matter on an individual level. Like how everyone is trained to talk about the weather, but they're not going to form many durable relationships off it. Unless they're genuinely interested, like football fans in superbowl. It's "time pass" topics, it's not nothing, but it's overstated. There's a reason why people jumped to communities that better aligned with individual interests as internet got more social, very people liked wasting their time on mediocre pop culture. Don't get me wrong, they exist in great numbers, but my feeling is still all this cultural commonality facilitates weak bonding among most people who would rather watch their niche interests on youtube given the chance than speculate on the last nights Xfiles.
Speaking as a millennial, I also think the syncness is overstated. It's always interesting when pre 90s generations reminisce about all these cultural consumption they had in common, but then realize they experienced them at different times. Access to media was not ubiquous pre internet, you either need disposable $$$ which many people didn't have, or need to have a hookup for bootleg. Many people can grow up hearing about HBO shows and didn't get to watch them until years later when file sharing proliferated. There is still a "vast" cultural common ground in the sense that... there actually wasn't so much content and what people remember / make effort to watch end up overlapping. Now there is legitimately so much broadcast media out there that I imagine it's hard to accidentally overlap. Something has been lost, but as someone who didn't like small talking about that stuff, but I am not sure that much.
A really big part of the bond between my girlfriend and me is that we are almost the same age, from similar families and had all the same TV and radio growing up. We actually have very different musical tastes, but we both know and like all the familiar stuff from the 90s.
I've had many relationships where we've been very different ages or grew up in different countries and it's surprising how much is missing from such a relationship. I could always tell this by observing former partners relish talking about this stuff on the occasion they meet someone in their own group. I, of course, couldn't join in.
The fragmentation started in the 90s, though. Already there were kids who had watched the football last night. Or they'd seen something American, like a film. These were available on subscription only TV (which I thought only rich families had, but, in fact, it was mostly families bad with money). More and more stuff went to paid TV, like cricket and boxing, that used to be available to all. Then you had kids who had inexplicably seen all of something like South Park despite it not being on any public channel. It steadily grew from there to the extent I wouldn't even be surprised if kids from non-football families don't know what Manchester United is, for example.
> I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.
I very much miss the shared social experience. In the 90s, you'd go to school on Monday and run down the latest X-Files episode. VCRs existed, but worst case you watched it later that night. Otherwise you missed out on the discussion.
Then the next week SNL did a parody and everyone got it because everyone saw the thing they were parodying.
Now that happens much less frequently. It still happens sometimes. When Wednesday came out, even people who hadn't seen the show knew what it was about. Same with Squid Games and Stranger Things.
The ratings share is what you want to look at. That roughly represents the percent of all households with TVs who watch a show. Look at the highest rated show for each year and what percent of people watch it.
Back in the day to be the highest rated, you had to be over 60%. Now a top rated non-sports show is maybe 10%.
Interestingly what I see now that I have my own kids is that they don't talk about scripted TV much at all -- they talk about video games and YouTube/tiktok videos that they all seem to have seen. So that seems to be where the social aspect is moving.
1980 1,700 audiometer homes and a rotating board of nearly 850 diary respondents
1985 Nielsen meters TV viewing in more than 5,500 U.S. homes
2003 Nielsen doubles its national TV sample from 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. households
2014 Nielsen has installed electronic devices known as “people meters” in 16,916 homes
2017 A Nielsen rep personally told me, this very afternoon, that there are about 17,000 Nielsen
2019 approximately 46,000 households nationwide
2021 Nielsen ... among its almost 60,000 active
2022 National TV panel reached 42,000 households
2023 Nielsen uses several sampling procedures, but its main one is to track the viewing patterns of about 20,000 households
Looks like in the nineties they had ~5K sample points.
It’s not just about how many people watched certain TV shows, it is that people who didn’t own or watch TV would know about such shows through daily conversations.
> Growing up 30 years ago, everybody knew the top 5 TV shows
To be fair 30 years ago there were probably only 20 or so new/big TV shows to watch and those shows tried to cater for all viewers - age/sex/background etc. Today the choice is much greater (and probably includes those 20 or so shows somewhere) as producers can create content that only specific demographics will be into but the international streaming nature means that enough people will watch.
The most popular shows today are those watched by younger viewers.
Yes, it's strange to watch my children not have the same 'shared experience' of TV that I had, although things like the Mandolorian did push them in that direction.
However they do share the experience with knowing what YouTube, TikTok, Insta shows to follow/watch within their friendship group - easier sharing maybe? dunno too old.
Is the world segregating such that there are fewer shared activities in a community to talk about?
Growing up 30 years ago, everybody knew the top 5 TV shows even if you didn’t watch them: they were the topic of conversations or at least listed in thr “TV guides”