The Gulf Between Online Listening and Rock Radio
From the AV Club:
Like many of you (I’m guessing, since you’re here), I spend a significant portion of my waking hours online. I spend so much time on the Internet that I sometimes mistake the virtual world for the world-world. Looking through the lens of social media and frequently visited websites and blogs, it’s easy to get a distorted view of pop culture.
If I never left my house (or looked away from my computer screen), I would believe that Breaking Bad is the nation’s most popular TV show, Drive the most successful movie, and whatever Pitchfork and Stereogum are covering this week the biggest band.
But I do leave my house occasionally, and I know that what seems like common knowledge on the web is in fact a curated version of reality that, at times, gives off an impression of how things are that is flat-out wrong. The fact is that a lot of cultural institutions that have been dismissed as passé, if not on the verge of extinction—network television, daily newspapers, summer blockbusters, compact discs—are in fact still drawing a plurality (if not a majority) of available eyeballs and eardrums.
Meanwhile, if you’re the sort of person who gets riled up about how “everybody” can’t stop talking about Bon Iver or Portlandia or some other indie sensation, you know you can turn your computer off and probably never have to hear that chatter again, right?
Read the rest of it. If you read blogs like this, you really need to. It’s illuminating.
