Skip to main content

Thoughts on Common Cultural Experience

During the summer of 1969, my family lived in a duplex.  My father had worked out a situation with our neighbor where the neighbor would bring his TV over to our side and we would hook both TV’s up.  Their family would come over and on July 20, 1969, both families on two different broadcast networks,  watched Neil Armstrong take his one small step.  Four adults and five children watched history being made as did many, if not most of the people in America watched that event and as people returned to school, work, church and other social gatherings, would talk about the moon landing.  News programs for weeks afterward would speak of the moon landing and what was happening and what was learned.  Sociologists call that a Common Cultural Experience.

As cable TV took over from broadcast TV and everyone had 150+ channels to watch, the Common Cultural Experiences became fewer and fewer.  With the advent of Netflix and YouTube the choices for what to watch has become so many and is expanding that it is possible for someone to go to work or school and find anyone who watched what they watched.  In the same way, news magazines and newspapers have given way to the internet, Facebook, Twitter and all manner of news sources.  This means that a person going to work might not find anyone who read the same news stories as they did.  In other words, the Common Cultural Experience has faded from daily life.

There are several events that are still commonly experienced.  Presidential elections are still followed by most everyone.  Every person will have some opinion or something to say about a presidential election.  Of course the political correctness and great divisions in American politics today means that the common cultural experience is lost on elections too.  If someone is fortunate to find others that believe the same way they do, with regard to politics, then that small group can have a Common Cultural Experience.

Some TV shows have tried to recapture this common experience.  When American Idol came to TV in 2002, it was poised to do the trick of creating a common experience, and it did.  As the judges worked their way across America looking for contestants, local news programs covered the stories.  When the national contest started, national TV news, written news, Facebook, Twitter and every other news source commented on what was happening.  In a very real way, they had captured the Common Cultural Experience.  People could talk about the show without being political and it brought America together for an hour once a week.

Still today, the king of Common Cultural Experience is the Super Bowl (which cannot be discussed without express written permission of the national football league).  March Madness to a lesser extent also captures the attention of the nation, because President Obama had a bracket.  But the Super Bowl still dominates.  The news covers it, it is talked about and people get together, like we did in 1969, to watch the game.  Whether people want to just see the commercials, or if they truly have a desire for one team to win, the Super Bowl is talked about for weeks ahead of time and for weeks after.  It is truly a Common Cultural Experience.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering the Franklin Day Planner

This week I have been rereading Hyrum Smith's book "The 10 Natural Laws of Productivity and Happiness." This book was written in the late 1980s and I remember reading it for the first time when I was working at Seagate Technologies, after my time in the Air Force. The core tool talked about in the book is the Franklin Day Planner . I remembering having one such planner, long before smart phones and Palm devices. Mine was a leather bound loose-leaf binder with calendar and note pages in it. I kept my daily tasks list and appointments in that binder, which became a record of my work history at Seagate and beyond. The Day Planner binders, pages and supplies were sold at a store called Franklin Quest , which was located at Valco Mall in Sunnyvale. At that time, I was a computer programmer. I was able to keep a record of all request for software, who made the request and when and what the requirements were. It seemed that I was the only one keeping a record of this b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on the Gap theory

The Bible is a closed book.  When God was done writing the Old Testament, he stopped until Matthew.  When he wrote Revelation, he stopped.  There are warnings in the Bible about adding or subtracting words from the Bible. Deuteronomy 4:2 & 12:32 and Revelation 22:18 are the three most specific.  The idea throughout the Bible is that this book is inspired Scripture and people have no right or authority to add to them or take away. This is why the Gap theory is so strange.  People probably feel it would be too obvious to add 16 extra chapters to Romans or Ephesians, so they try and sneak some extra stuff into Genesis.  That is the Gap Theory. The Gap Theory says that there is a space of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  The space that some people insert is a couple of hundred years all the way up to billions of years.  The most popular use for the Gap Theory is to put the entire evolutionary process between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1...
Post a Comment
Read more

What do I preach?

I preach the Word of God.  The style I use is called expositional exegetical .  I draw the meaning out of the Scripture and explain it.  I believe this is the only approved type of preaching.  To preach events out of the newspaper or the latest psychology fad does nothing to edify the saints or glorify God and certainly it does not contain the power to save. The context for my preaching is that I preach through books of the Bible.  Most recently I have been preaching through the gospel of John.  I started in John 1:1 and last Sunday I preached through John 21:15-17.  Charles Spurgeon preached through the entire Bible, but did not take the verses in order.  He bounced around, and got through the entire Bible. One of the most popular styles of preaching in large churches or churches that want to be large is a style called “topical.”  Traditionally topical preaching takes a topic that is from the news or something that the pastor is reading....
Post a Comment
Read more