A quick statement of the obvious: Pop culture does not just proliferate ― it accelerates. With new media rolling off the assembly line every day through which to hawk a skill and get famous, the amount of celebrity in the world increases not just incrementally ― following the passage of time ― but exponentially ― following the development of new platforms.
As kids like me get older, we’ve always had to face the fact that, one day, we simply won’t be able to keep up. Some of us will deftly swing from trend to trend like little hyperactive monkeys (no offense) but most of us had a heyday of rabid media consumption, picked what we liked, and settled down.
If anything’s changed in this process, it’s the age at which this revelation hits us.
There is absolutely no reason to struggle against this. It always has been, and it always will be. What bothers me is not the culture that’s slipping through my fingers, but rather the culture that I cannot for the life of me avoid.
By being around other people, by participating in society, we make ourselves vulnerable to ideas we didn’t choose to think about and, hey! That’s just a part of being alive. But have you ever felt like everywhere you turn you see a certain face, hear snippets of a certain song, or have a certain phrase quoted at you until you feel like a certain measure of consent is being taken away? I call it compulsory culture.
I can’t stress enough how little this is a product of the 21st century. If you try to pin the phenomenon on kids being on their phones, you’re falling into the same trap that snared our ancestors into thinking that talking pictures would never take off.
Everything is always novel in our society; it’s not that a specific medium is making all of the cultural decisions here. It’s that, whatever that medium is, it’s not us.
Compulsory culture can be hell for the individual. I have no interest in sports, and I loathe the fact that I can sort of follow a football game. I never wanted to know anything about it, but exposure has cost me my blissful ignorance. It has become compulsory.
People may often feel this way about certain pop musicians or viral trends or other things that could conceivably go on a billboard in Times Square. Sometimes, our personal tormentors go beyond annoying us and can actually trigger or scar us, but regardless of how unpleasant compulsory culture can be for an individual, this is not where the real danger lies.
Compulsory culture is of much greater consequence when looked at at a large scale, and I’ve attempted to condense this into three principles listed in ascending order of gravity:
- Compulsory culture can lead to herd mentality. Remember the summer that everyone got into Mumford & Sons? You couldn’t go 20 minutes without hearing that infernal banjo solo, you know the one, and all of a sudden suspenders and beards were in like everyone suddenly wanted to be an Irish bartender. Then, the next summer, everyone hated them. Only now are certain friends of mine beginning to peer out of the shadows and say that they actually kind of liked the band after all. Yet at no point did anybody ever stop to think that you’re not legally obligated to have an opinion on Mumford & Sons, regardless of whether that opinion went with or against the grain.
- Compulsory culture makes our desires irrelevant. With the Mumford & Sons conundrum in mind, how much of what we consume do we actually like? Did people secretly hate that band the whole time they were supposed to like them? Did they like them the whole time they were supposed to hate them? Which one wins out in the end and becomes true, and at what point does it cease to matter? The relationship between consumer and product should be that the former chooses the latter, and this is what happens when that relationship is inverted.
- Compulsory culture obscures the fact that what we are consuming is, by nature, political. Not all of compulsory culture is as harmless as football or the “Harlem Shake.” Some of these compulsory images, like oversexualized young female pop stars, can easily create lasting damage on the collective psyche. But it gets worse. Imagine if CNN hadn’t published a story every time Trump said something asinine on his 2016 campaign trail. Imagine if that “covfefe” tweet never became coffee table conversation. Imagine if no one cared that Jeff Bezos went to space.
Sometimes the power of certain cultural artifacts is not imbued in the artifact itself, but in its exposure. We call it inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be. Knowing that there is ideology contained in even the most mundane things, imagine if we had the power to let sleeping dogs lie.