Peak monoculture might have been in 2014:

At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. DeGeneres’ Twitter account posted it immediately afterward, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time.

The selfie was an instantly viral moment in a telecast that drew the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people. The photo (for which Cooper used a phone made by Samsung, a major Oscars sponsor) became a dayslong news cycle unto itself…

It wasn’t just the Oscars that were big that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets were arguably at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in almost 21 million. The Emmy Awards in August 2014 had 15.59 million viewers on NBC — down about 12 percent from 2013 but still a very healthy audience. Five other music awards shows that year brought in at least 10 million viewers…

If awards shows are a proxy for what people — both the folks who make the things nominated for awards and the public that consumes them — are dialed in on at any given time, then our collective attention has steadily waned over time. None of the big awards telecasts has approached its 2014 audience numbers in the 12 years since. The Oscar broadcast is still usually the biggest non-sports primetime show of the year on a broadcast network, but that now means 18 million or so viewers rather than 40 million-plus. The Grammys (14.41 million viewers in 2026) and other awards shows have similarly fallen off.

As the article notes, it might be hard to isolate one point where a common collective experience in the United States dissolved. I’ve heard people date it to going beyond three major TV networks to the rise of premium cable TV shows (think The Sopranos) to the rise of the Internet in the 1990s to streaming services to the advent of 24/7 cable news. Usually this line of discussion refers to the number of media outlets people can access but it is also related to the number of narratives or stories people have.

Another way to think about it: prior to the rise of mass broadcast media in the twentieth century (radio and TV), how collective were people’s experiences within and across countries? News traveled more slowly. People heard about important events but it might be days or weeks later.

The accompanying piece to this article would be considering what we have lost if large numbers of people are no longer watching the same Oscars or going to the same movies. How much does this contribute to fragmentation, polarization, individualism? Or how has it helped contribute to freedom and creativity?

And it might be worth remembering that such fragmentation might not necessarily last. The trend toward personally curated experiences might continue – but it could also go back the other direction. The streaming services could all collapse back into each other. The audio streaming platforms could consolidate. The Internet and social media might retract in scope. The multiculture or pluriculture might be an artifact of the early 21st century.