21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Gen Z Isn’t Just Online — They’re Living in Parallel Realities.
There was a time, not long ago, when Americans — regardless of region, class, or politics — shared a common cultural foundation. From the Saturday morning cartoons children watched to the nightly news programs adults relied on, mainstream culture was both a mirror and a glue: it reflected our values while keeping us tethered to the same national experience. That era is over.
We have entered the Age of Alternative Culture, an era defined by fragmentation, algorithmic echo chambers, and cultural isolation masquerading as global connection.
The culprit is not a single villain but a confluence of forces, chief among them the rise of the Internet and the omnipresence of algorithmically curated content. Social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram don’t just reflect our preferences; they shape them, refining our tastes and beliefs into niche categories optimized for engagement. Every scroll reinforces what the algorithm thinks you want, narrowing your worldview under the guise of preference.
We are becoming numbers on a screen in an illusion of mass connectivity, our eyes more valuable than our minds. The consequence is a culture atomized into digital micro-nations, where people live in parallel realities consuming different music, news, humor, and values. There is no longer a mainstream — there are now only streams, and each of us is drowning in our own.
This is the downside to the end of mass media. It united us, but it also made us vulnerable to whatever the elites’ obsession du jour was. The original television networks still do everything they can to keep the idea going: that’s why with the exception of Greg Gutfeld, all late comedians lean hard to the left; and why the news media circled the wagons to protect Biden from 2020 to the summer of 2024, until they all circled the wagons to protect Harris until November. That’s why Silicon Valley tried to replace the Blogosphere with the walled gardens of Twitter and Facebook. While I wish we still had a shared pop culture, I’m not at all sure I’d want it to be what was left of it by the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web began to become ubiquitous, eventually supplanted by the smartphone.