🤳 How seriously to take Gen Z on the end of pop culture
The answer might be to take them seriously, but not literally.
Happy Labor Day weekend, everybody. If you’re reading this, I hope that means you’re not at Burning Man getting caught in the cosmically unlucky weather out there right now. Enjoy the long weekend, whatever you’re doing.
Is Gen Z going to end pop culture once and for all?
Pop culture writing gave me my professional start in the world, so reading recently and over the past year that most 18–25-year-olds don’t believe there’s "such thing as 'mainstream' pop culture" sets the question-mark thought bubbles off in my head. I got into it in a blog entry last week about what might be really going on — as well as what marketers, news publishers, and entertainment companies should make of these assessments.
In short, Gen Z didn’t invent being a hipster about gravitating toward movies, music, and authors that their friends and family didn’t like first. However, they are living at a moment in history when COVID-era isolation, a bounty of user-generated content, and a proliferation of quasi-private/off-main-feed communities all facilitated the fragmentation of their attention, as well as the niche group identities with which they can align themselves.
At the same time, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about the loss of mainstream pop culture as a whole. It may not be experienced by the same readily accessible critical masses of people who used to view cable TV channels in the 1980s and 1990s. The Mickey Mouses, Marios, and Pikachus of the world are still marketable and present, though. And Gen Zers are still borrowing nostalgia from previous generations in the form of faux vintage T-shirts just like their parents did.
I don’t know about you, but to me that’s still participating in mainstream pop culture.
By all means, read the rest of the original post and let me know if you disagree. I’m fully aware that I’m a Xennial looking out of my own demographic window to make assumptions about the youngs in this case. (But that also doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong.)
Side work
Believe it or not, seeing all three hours of "Oppenheimer" this week was actually work (hope to give you more about that at a later date).
Recent side reads and watches
"Oppenheimer," which is easily among my favorite Christopher Nolan films, thanks heavily to the world-class performances and framing of the material
Elise Hu’s "Flawless," which covers the topics of beauty and surgery in Korea through a few lenses that bring a great deal of researched historical insight, but really hit the strongest notes with me in its exploration of the tech gaze and how notions of self-optimization in social media contexts should be understood
"Ahsoka," the new Star Wars show that may be a little slow-going at times through no fault of the actors who carry it, though it has deployed some nice bridges to the franchise’s continuity between "Clone Wars" and "Rebels" and where things are at now