There was, people say, once something called a monoculture, and it has now passed into history. We didn’t call it that at the time, because we were in the midst of it, and no more needed a word to designate it than the proverbial fish needed a word for water. I am speaking here, specifically, about popular culture rather than culture more broadly (although that has also sustained several deep fractures of late). The monoculture was knowing all the words to the theme song of Friends, whether you liked the show or not. When you and everyone you knew had seen at least one episode of Walker, Texas Ranger or Dawson’s Creek that was the monoculture. When you were conversant in the music of Ace of Base and Shania Twain and Westlife and B*Witched, because it would have required some extraordinarily radical lifestyle adjustments not to hear it wherever you went.
[ The idealised decade: Friends, the 1990s and a vanished worldOpens in new window ]
Not that the monoculture was all bad, by any means: the monoculture was also, magically, every kid in your class in primary school having watched last night’s episode of Twin Peaks and, in popular music, the unprecedented mainstream ubiquity of something as bleak and strange as Nirvana’s In Utero. Things that were violently at odds with mainstream culture did, from time to time, break through into that mainstream, often precisely because of their resistance to it.
[ Fintan O’Toole: Game of Thrones is an epic for our times (2019)Opens in new window ]
It’s hard to put an exact date on the death of the monoculture. When Game of Thrones ended its run in 2019, a lot of cultural critics argued that it marked the end of an era in which millions of people watched a show simultaneously. But I’m inclined to date it to about five years earlier. I’m inclined to say – if only for the sake of the sort of snappily reductive claim that befits my role as a newspaper columnist – that it died on Tuesday, September 9th, 2014. This was the day on which users of Apple’s iTunes awoke to find that a new U2 album, Songs of Innocence, had been uploaded to their music libraries, and that they hated it, and wanted this gift returned to the ether from which it had emerged.
The interesting thing about this moment, and the reason it is so tempting to hear in it the final death rattle of the monoculture, was that the online music platform through which the U2 album had been smuggled on to people’s devices was itself an example of the information technology that ensured no one cultural object would ever again be possessed in common.
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[ U2's Songs of Experience: the most tortuous journeyOpens in new window ]
The whole point of something such as iTunes, and its successor Apple Music – and Spotify, Tidal and so on – was that everyone could have whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it, and everyone would embark on their own hyper-individualist musical journey. The internet – with its music streaming services, its video-sharing sites, its social media apps, its endlessly gushing content pumps – killed the monoculture, or so the theory goes. The days of having to put up with a cultural product being foisted on you, whether you liked it or not, were over. What was intended as a technologically forward-thinking move on U2’s part wound up being received as a weirdly anachronistic gesture, in a world that was about to become the disorienting sprawl of indecipherable memes and micro-trends we now inhabit.
All of this has been in my mind over the last few weeks, because of one recent cultural event that felt like a partial restoration of that old cultural order: Oasis reforming and touring again. If your immediate reaction to seeing that sentence is to think “I simply cannot read another word about the reformed Oasis”, then that’s kind of my point. I, too, have had some version of this thought on several occasions in recent weeks. Every time I glanced at a newspaper, or opened Instagram or happened to be in a room or a vehicle with a radio playing, I was reminded of the resurrection and return of the Gallagher brothers.
On the weekend of the Croke Park concerts, when the Oasis content was at its most bludgeoningly ubiquitous, an advertisement for An Post cropped up in my Instagram feed. That new thing happened where you have to wait five seconds before you can scroll past the official ad (and on to something that is, although less obviously an ad, still an ad). It was a cartoon image of a green post box dressed in the sort of parka long associated with Liam Gallagher, and the post box is singing the words “Because maybe you’re gonna be the one who mails me” – a cumbersome reference to the chorus of Oasis’s song Wonderwall. You could sense the marketing people’s relief that there was an agreed big cultural event, a solidly established reference-point to pitch from.
Perhaps I risk over-analysing an advertisement that was presumably cobbled together at the last minute to catch the tidal wave of Oasis nostalgia, but seeing it was a strange reminder of what it was like to live in a pre-internet monoculture, when everyone had a shared set of touchstones, and existed in a more or less agreed cultural context. And it wasn’t a good kind of nostalgia, for me at least. It felt strangely dispiriting, and it made me realise that, for all my own occasional lapses into nostalgia, I didn’t actually miss the old dispensation.
But the fact that everyone is looking at, and listening to, different things on their phones now – all of us existing within our own impenetrably personalised feedback loops – doesn’t mean that there is no longer a single dominant culture. These technologies – the phones, the platforms on which we now spend so many of our waking hours, and, increasingly, the AI software that is becoming more and more central to every aspect of our increasingly mediated world – are what now constitutes a new kind of monoculture. What we experience within these technologies is, on a surface level, individualised, and yet, on a deeper level, insistently uniform.
