Over the 20th century we lost a community-based folk culture; the folk songs and myths blasted away by mass technology, religious observance in sharp decline — but at least we had a kind of substitute. We were more often on the same page. Now, we consume in silos — and silos have therefore become fashionable.
Even the megastars of the recent past, Bowie or Elton John, are retooled to appear boutique. The movie Bohemian Rhapsody eulogises the band Queen — who have sold 300 million albums worldwide — as “misfits and outcasts” who “don’t belong”, playing to an audience of the same. At Wembley Stadium.
Queen were like an institution, attracting — like Coronation Street — a huge cross-section of the population. Few things can claim that today, and the smaller that audiences become, the more that those audiences become a febrile mob that can go from obsessive love to hate and back again in seconds.
These are communities that are formed ad hoc around shared, often eccentric, interests; without the scrutiny and self-doubt that leaven most shared endeavours they quickly, inevitably, become little fiefdoms of the ultra-committed. So the loudest, most intemperate, most present voices are amplified and now, crucially, are catered to, as if they were important. Huge corporations quake in fear from tiny numbers of tweets, again sometimes just one — witness Innocent smoothies and Kiva recently jumping like scalded cats after solitary tweets from activists complaining about them for merely following a pensioner labelled as “transphobic”.
Back to the 90s again. The first internet communities — the social media of their day — were the “rec.arts” news groups that formed around shared hobbies and fixations. Looking back, they served as an early warning system, with spats, threats, temper tantrums, sendings to Coventry and castings out into the wilderness. But then at least there was a real world to judge this against, to escape back to.
Today the world is one big newsgroup — rec.arts-reality.com. The real-world social tics that stop polarised factions forming just aren’t present in these mediums. Most people, in the flesh, will want to agree around some kind of careful thought and politeness simply to make any dialogue possible. Remove niceties and things get nasty.
Only the loudest screams are heard and so now the strangest and most extreme views held by tiny numbers of people — that biological sex is not real, that the police should be abolished, that a person’s skin colour makes them irredeemably wicked — are rewarded, reinforced, even protected from being questioned or mocked.
This politics-as-fandom has inevitably started to spill out into the real world. Antifa and the storming of the Capitol are cosplay gone wild in the streets. The Twitter-popular fandoming of the Labour Party around Jeremy Corbyn had predictably ruinous results as it slammed into the real world of the British electorate. The zealotry of the EU’s Twitter “FBPE” fandom led the Remainer faction in Parliament to overestimate their hand and blow their chance of a softer Brexit.
In a strange reversal, as politics becomes more like fandom, the fandoms of old have started to behave like political actors. Star Wars fans lobby Disney as if they were a campaign group, as we saw with the recent dismissal of the actor Gina Carano. Fans of K-pop outfit BTS buy out a Trump rally to protest in support of Black Lives Matter. The poor folk band Hanson are forced into making a statement on the issue of which everyone must have an opinion (and the correct opinion) by their demented fans. Ditto with actor Chris Pratt.
And, of course, there is J.K. Rowling.
Arthur Miller famously described the ideal of a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself”. A common culture, a still centre, should be the cardinal purpose of the BBC. Instead the BBC, like many of its commercial rivals, has run scared, adopting and amplifying the craziest voices because those people are most likely to generate the small number of clicks that seem big in a microcosm.
We desperately need to reaffirm a shared order of meaning. The nerds and noisy complainers have to be put back in their box — I can confirm, as a member of the nerd community, that we were happier there. The special discipline of producing mass popular culture that freely and genuinely reflects its whole audience is being lost, and without it we are obsessing about the oddest things. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Let’s think in big numbers, in commonality, and forget fandom. Thirteen million cheers for the lowest common denominator.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe