Are we becoming overly Niche?

As the world becomes more and more niche every day, some changes are amazing.  Instead of having to adapt to enjoy and learn about subjects that don’t interest you, you now can fully explore subjects directly up your alley.

This is great that you do not need to hide your true interests.  Did I want people to know I loved Star Trek and math growing up?  Absolutely not, my truly genuine love of sports is what I talked about (I feel bad for people who had to fake a love for a subject they did not care for).  But as the world becomes more niche, I can easily find people who love sports, Sci-Fi, statistics and riddles.  Sounds perfect, people with my exact same likes.  But is this really a good thing?  For one, how will you ever broaden your experiences if you only try things specifically tailored to you (I am looking at you Netflix).  Maybe you have other interests, but have yet to discover them.  However, this is not the only problem.

In the past, the shared experience of a person is experiencing the same major events as everyone else.  The moon landing, the hysteria over Orwell’s War of the World’s radio show and the assignation of JFK to name three.  All of these were before I was born (1969, 1938, 1963 respectively).  But now shared experiences are becoming less and less.  And even worse, they are only becoming tragedies such as the assignation of JFK.  Every who was alive in 2001 remembers 9/11, but we need more than terrible events to collectively remember.

Do you know how many people watched the final episode of M.A.S.H.?  106 million, that is crazy.  How about the 1977 mini-series Roots?  51% of American households, that is above Super Bowl numbers, again crazy.  Even in my lifetime, the series finale of Friends was 52.9 million but then Sopranos was only 11.9 million (unfair since it wasn’t TV, it was HBO).  Are we ever going to have a shared experience of something amazing again?  I don’t want to only remember where I was during 9/11 or some other terror attack or other tragedy.  Even the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 was only memorable for someone living in or around Boston.  I want to be able to tell my kids where I was when I watched the last episode of Parks and Recreation.  The big problem, I only shared that with 4.2 million people.  I am sure, now that the show is available on Netflix that number has doubled or tripled, which is great, but not a truly shared experience.

I want a culture in which everyone can find the things they truly love.  But I also want everyone to find things of amazement, excitement and entertainment to also bond over.  Maybe we should send a team of people to Mars.  Not because they will make any scientific discovery our rovers over the years have not, but because, everyone will be glued to their TV (or more likely phones/computers) together.  We need to have these moments of happiness and enjoyment together, not just of tragedy.

Plus, if we get 300 million people watch the Mars landing, we can have 50 more years of conspiracy theories on how it like the moon landing was faked.