I can have my own private culture…

As I was driving to work this morning with my son we were listening to Pandora radio and my son asked me if I had noticed the trend toward a revival of jazz. I admitted I hadn't because I am not at all in touch with popular culture any more. I don't listen to commercial radio and I turned off cable so I don't watch commercial TV anymore -- not even sports. Then it occurred to me that the trend toward individually tailored entertainment made possible by the Internet might actually be accelerating the atomization of society.

Benedict Anderson in his study of the origins of nationalism titled Imagined Communities attributes the emergence of nationalism to the rise of print capitalism in the 18th century. Anderson is a doctrinaire Marxist and I think attributing everything to the rise of capitalism is a mistake. But he was right about one thing and that is that mass exposure of a geographically separated population to the same information contributes to the homogenization of society. If everyone is accessing the same information an imagined bond is created that allows people, say, in San Diego, to feel an affinity with people in New York and elsewhere who they are never likely to meet.

For example, I believe it is entirely likely that the translation of the Bible into the vernacular was a huge contributor to the rise of the nation-state because it standardized language over large geographical areas. Where people before spoke and understood only the dialect of their local area (and maybe some Latin), with the publication of the one book everyone *read* (because, after all, it was the Protestants who wanted the Bible translated) suddenly everyone in the country was reading "French" or "English" or "German," and soon that was reflected in the spoken language. (Did you notice that people from Atlanta no longer speak with a twang?) The common language tends to engender a sense of common identity, hence the possibility of feeling a kinship through the "nation," even though the nation is actually an intellectual construction not at all rooted in historical reality.

This process accelerated with the mass media culture of the twentieth century. When I grew up in the sixties, there were three channels on the television, everyone listened to the same 10 artists or so on the same few radio stations which reflected two genres: pop and country. In the late sixties the so-called "underground" rock stations added a third alternative for us hippies, and then later the "soul" stations added even more diversity.

But in the last twenty years the Internet has made it possible to access incredibly diverse repositories of culture, to the point that now it is possible to tailor a radio station to your own personal tastes, to watch only the TV shows you are interested in watching, to essentially avoid any connection to the common culture at all. It has become possible for me to create my own cultural shell. I can have my own private culture.

Isn't that wild? How can we encourage a sense of community in the Church when each of the congregants listens only to their own iPod?