All the culture we cannot see
All the culture we cannot see
Culture's not stuck. We just don't have an effective way to categorise it.
Now that we’re 83% of the way through the year, I’ve started compiling my favourite albums. I started making an actual list in 2002, when I also used to pull together the overall office top ten.
I realise that even listening to music as complete albums, and not just tracks on playlists, marks me out as a dinosaur in our modern age. To me, the album (a bunch of songs carefully compiled by the artist to have a distinct flow and typically around 35-60 minutes long) is a hallowed cultural format.
I still remember the first album I bought with my own money (Queen’s Innuendo) and the excitement I’d feel in the run-up to a big album release. My friends Richy, Gary and I went to Virgin Megastore to hear a playback of OK Computer in full before it was released. We mooched about the shop aimlessly while the record played, which is pretty weird in retrospect.
I know the album only holds that position in my heart because I got hooked on the format at an impressionable age. And media publications only continue to publish albums of the year lists because plenty of people like me love to compare our selections with a range of critics’ choices.
And while there would be outrage if any major media publication decided against publishing its annual “best of…” lists, there’s undoubtedly a sense that these attempts at annual curation, at creating a canon for the year, feel anachronistic in this day and age.
The typical set of lists covers albums, songs, movies, books, and TV shows. These are the formats that typically define a year’s cultural output. But culture is definitely more than these distinctly 20th-century formats. To accurately represent what’s happening in art, culture, and entertainment, we surely need to refresh how we review, categorise, and even appreciate what’s happening in the world.
ITV is giving it a go this year, with a show booked in for the Christmas period that will count down “the 100 best TikTok and other social media clips of 2024”. The big platforms used to make a big deal of their “year in review” activities (I worked on a “biggest Yahoo searches” campaign in 2012 lol), but such is the vastness of the biggest platforms, such summaries can quickly end up feeling generic.
You want your users (sorry, “communities”) to recognise themselves and their experiences in those reviews. Feeling generic and unreflective was definitely the fate of the previously peerless YouTube rewind series - vast waves of negativity driven by “Why have you included [x], but not [y]?”
Perhaps that’s why Spotify’s Wrapped continues to be so popular—it blends the hyper-personal with overall platform trends (you were in the top 5% of Frank Ocean listeners!). It feels relevant to users but also places them firmly in the overall Spotify milieu.
Good on ITV for going with something different from “the nation’s favourite Xmas adverts”, but you can’t help but feel that picking 100 TikToks/Reels/Shorts will be just a drop in the vast ocean of videos that have caught some virality this year. Such is the speed and scale with which the big online entertainment platforms operate, we’re a long way from everyone having seen “Charlie bit my finger” or the double rainbow dude for 2010.
This difficulty of categorisation, the disparity between what “everyone did” and individual lived experience, is likely one of the reasons so many people feel that culture is “stuck” this year.
As
points out in a guest post for , there is a sense of decay that surrounds our established markers of the cultural canon. Music, TV, movies, and even fashion all feel stuck in some kind of stasis, where the present overlaps with the past with little sense of linearity.“Based on clothing styles alone, a photo taken in 2013 could be mistaken for one taken in 2019, a creative stasis unthinkable even thirty years ago.”
But the critical point that Dee makes is that any diagnosis that our culture is stuck tends to overindex on those established, venerated-in-end-of-year-lists formats. Those diagnoses “assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.” Dee asserts another “possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us. We just don’t register it as “culture.””
The piece goes on to list what we might consider the new markers of culture in 2024: social media personalities, TikTok sketch comedy, fanfiction super-authors (Fifty Shades of Grey started life as Twilight fanfiction), and the art of curating mood boards and vibes.
Just because The Guardian doesn’t make an end-of-year list celebrating the top 50 TikTok sketch comedians shouldn’t denigrate the creativity and originality that goes into one-person demonstrations of humour.
It’s not that culture doesn’t exist; it’s that the mechanics of curation for culture at the scale of YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and OnlyFans have yet to be properly established. It’s relatively easy for a team of arts and culture critics at an established media publication to keep up with the year’s movies, music, and TV (especially as streaming production tails off after the post-COVID boom years).
Keeping up with all the trends on platforms with billions of users and videos is an altogether tougher ask. My go-to destination for a long time was the trending tab on YouTube - it was often a vital source of inspiration for video treatments and ideas. You can still get a sense of popularity there (I thought the meme “I tried the worst reviewed [x] on [y] platform to see how bad it was” has some creative juice), but it also feels unsurprising. Football highlights, creators in cars, Mr Beast and his clones. It’s like looking at the weekly TV rankings - it’s always Strictly, Bake Off and Coronation Street.
Katherine Dee concludes that our challenge isn’t about ranking the best online trends from 2024. Our challenge is “in developing the language to understand what already exists” on our big online entertainment platforms. And that challenge is as acute for agencies and brands as it is for legacy media outlets.
So, how do we answer that challenge? Firstly, we need to get out of our bubbles and put ourselves in the shoes (or at least the thumbs) of our target audiences. Pixar calls this process taking an “audience safari.” In other words, we need to replicate how different audiences use different platforms.
For Pixar, that meant spending time in a high-end Parisian restaurant when making Ratatouille. For us, it could be setting up a dummy TikTok account and starting an FYP journey that begins with videos we know our audiences like. Within a short period of watching some starter videos, you should end up with an FYP that feels markedly different to your own.
Alongside this hyperspecificity, there’s still merit in aggregating the biggest numbers and most significant trends from platforms. The team at Garbage Day puts together a monthly rundown of the most popular hashtags, creators, and videos on all the major platforms. While sometimes these remain sticky from month to month, new and notable jumps can provide indications of how the wider cultural trends are changing.
We can use generative AI as part of this unpacking and rebundling process. This week, I wanted to gauge Reddit's reaction to the UK budget to see how much (or little) it contrasted with the broader media reaction. I pulled all the data using Brandwatch, focusing on the most prominent UK subreddits, then uploaded the Excel export of all mentions to ChatGPT to pull out the trends in conversation. Unsurprisingly, the increased tax burden dominated the conversation, with much discussion in r/UKpersonalfinance around how it would affect individuals (i.e. what does this mean for ME).
However you choose to explore this long tail of mostly unseen popular culture, I feel confident you’ll come up with at least some refreshing, exciting, or surprising posts and ideas.
While it may feel to some like our culture is stuck, a perennial “stucktopia”, I think we’re instead living through a period of two-tiered arts and entertainment. There’s the mainstream, top-tier output, characterised by hyperactive fandoms and regular reboots. Like the European Super League, this is a relatively exclusive club. Potential new joiners receive invites only sparingly.
At the other end of the spectrum is everything else, a long tail of music, films, TV, books, comedy, dance, and internet personalities with dedicated fanbases that don’t operate at a large enough scale to get regularly noticed by the media.
It’s in the middle that the squeeze happens, and perhaps the absence of this middle leads certain commentators to think that culture is stuck. Those critically lauded shows, artists, or movies that are just one small burst of publicity away from going truly mainstream, joining that elite top-tiered club. That pathway, sometimes accelerated by an award win or featuring in a burst of end-of-year top ten round-ups, is much less likely to generate mainstream popularity.
Based on where we are today, which is subject to change because change keeps culture interesting, the choice feels relatively simple.
Either revel in mainstream culture but accept that the trends and changes happening at the top are slower and more tectonic.
Or revel in the variety and seemingly endless posts on offer in exploring culture’s niches, its smaller, self-funded creators. It may mean that your end-of-year round-ups, your Spotify Wrapped equivalents, are entirely different to everyone else’s. But there’ll still be overlap with the shared rhythms of popular culture in there somewhere - perhaps just not as many as before.