End of the monoculture

Lots of media types are currently doing their post-mortems about the fall of Buzzfeed, Vice and other former new media darlings. At the same time, many in the tech world are looking at Instagram and other social media companies abandoning their social graphs in favor of content chosen by an algorithm in an effort to keep up with TikTok. Taken together, we have some more data points that the idea of media companies that can scale to encompass the entire world was an extrapolation of a trend that was actually an aberration in time.

There was this period of 100 years, where due to the dynamics of the technology at the time, content was limited but widespread. Therefore there was a certain shared monoculture that formed around everyone who consumed this same content. With the advent of movies, radio and television, this monoculture formed part of our lives and was something that underpinned our shared experiences.

At first, it seemed that the internet would simply serve as a tool to extend this monoculture further and further around the world until you got to the point that everyone would consume the same content and interact with each other on the same social media platforms. But as connection becomes more widely spread and the cost to create content continues to fall, there really is no limit on content production anymore. So now, unlike 30 years ago during the peak of prime time TV, there's no need for everyone to watch the same things at the same time.

As a result, we are starting to see cracks in the monoculture, where people are more interested in specific niches and increasingly choose the media that they want to consume. The big question is, what does shared experience look like from a cultural perspective and what does it mean for content creators from a business perspective? This is the change that people should be thinking about, rather than pondering what will come after Twitter. Like many pillars of the monoculture, many smaller things will take Twitter's place over time, the real question is, what will those be.