If you grew up before streaming and social media, you surely remember your most obvious

entertainment options were the same TV shows and movies that everybody else was watching.

You mostly discovered new music by listening to the radio.

It sounds sort of quaint in this era of hyper-individualized content feeds tailored to deliver what you crave,

but has this new way of doing things been good for us?

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Pop culture is designed to work for a broad audience.

It doesn't even try to deliver on any individual's exact preferences.

What all that good enough but not tailor-made stuff does offer, though, is a shared frame of reference,

common cultural illusions, stuff we can talk about with strangers.

And that turns out to have been more important for a functioning society than many of us may have

realized.

Ben Fritz has been thinking a lot about this lately.

He's an entertainment industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal, which published his

article, The Rise and Fall of American Monoculture.

Ben, welcome to think.

Thank you for having me. So this word monoculture usually

refers to like growing one single crop over a wide land area. What does the term mean when you're

using it in the context of pop culture? Sure, but the American monoculture as far as pop culture

refers to that long period in the 20th century when

there was a very limited amount of television and film and music that we could listen to and watch

because distribution was severely constrained. There were only three or four broadcast networks.

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