This Time Magazine article likens the current fickle and flighty American culture to the recent meme of Flash Mobs, the sudden gathering of a crowd to perform some random act only to then suddenly disperse. Americans gather together only briefly now, as they always did pre-mass media. Normally, Americans live in their own very different worlds and came together as a mass culture only because no other option was available. Those options to return to a “tribe-like” life are now available in full force. The death of mass culture is a result of media fragmentation.
Media fragmentation has finally caught up with the cultural fragmentation that has always been the fabric of America. All Americans came from varied backgrounds, were drawn together for a brief moment by mass media, only to return the original stasis of mass differentiation. Mass culture was an oddity. Fragmentation is the norm.
