Netflix's War on Mass Culture
[Commentary] Given all the faces you see glued to computers, tablets, and cell phones, you might think that people watch much less television than they used to. You would be wrong. According to Nielsen, Americans on average consume nearly five hours of TV every day, a number that has actually gone up since the 1990s. That works out to about 34 hours a week and almost 1,800 hours per year, more than the average French person spends working. The vast majority of that time is still spent in front of a standard television, watching live or prescheduled programming. That’s why, should Netflix and the other streamers even partially succeed at redefining the network as we know it, the effects will be so profound.
In fact the company has embarked upon a venture more radical than any before it. With no standard daily cultural diet, we’ll tilt even more from a country united by shows like “I Love Lucy” or “Friends” toward one where people claim more personalized allegiances. The baby-boomer intellectuals who lament the erosion of shared values are right: Something will be lost in the transition. At a deeper level, a country already polarized by the echo chambers of ideologically driven journalism and social media will find itself with even less to agree on. However, community lost can be community gained, and as mass culture weakens, it creates openings for the cohorts that can otherwise get crowded out. Certainly, a culture where niche supplants mass hews closer to the original vision of the Americas, of a new continent truly open to whatever diverse and eccentric groups showed up. The United States was once, almost by definition, a place without a dominant national identity. As it revolutionizes television, Netflix is merely helping to return us to that past.
Netflix's War on Mass Culture