These are not beliefs in an ordinary sense, but advertisements of personal qualities and tribal identification. Decontextualized, contradictory, intensely-proclaimed religious and political “beliefs” displace legacy systems of meaning. Religions decohere into vague “spirituality,” and political isms give way to bizarre, transient, reality-impaired online movements. As culture and society atomize, it becomes impossible to maintain a coherent ideology. The vestiges of systematic social organization are crumbling. It is wonderful to find people who share your nearly-unique interests-but can online relationships replace in-person ones? Can electronic communities provide the same benefits as local ones? You may not know the gender, race, or nationality of some of your closest friends. You no longer need to be in the happening place to get access to a genre or scene. Internet social networks support larger, geographically dispersed virtual communities. Instead, society moves onto global interactive media. The subcultural solution to the problems of self and society-intermediate-scale subsocieties that buffer individuals from national institutions-failed. In atomization, the subcultural mode’s local communities cannot hold together, because they no longer deliver adequate meaning. Duchamp couldn’t out-irreverence or out-peculiar Psy. The avant garde has finally expired as an irrelevant archaism. There are no systematic principles for comparing value, so immediate emotional appeal trumps formal qualities. In atomized culture, intensity-shock, novelty, extremes-substitutes for structure. “Authenticity”-the aesthetic ideal of subculturalism-is impossible because there are no standards to be authentic to. It’s normal for a Top 40 hit to mash up country-style pedal steel guitar with bubble-gum-pop vocals, hip-hop rapping, EDM bass, and black metal blast beats. K-pop may be a subculture in Korea, but in America it’s just YouTube. Atomization seemed at first like subculturalism taken to an extreme, but it is a qualitatively new mode. Genre-which defined many subcultures-has disintegrated. Its genre is, in fact, K-pop but may be the only K-pop song most Westerners have ever heard. 1 Even counting repeat views, it’s probably well-known to most young people on the planet. Gangnam Style has been watched 2.9 billion times on YouTube. Now, everyone in the world listens to the same music, regardless of genre, again-just because it’s trending on YouTube. In the 1960s, for the first time, everyone in an American generation listened to the same music, regardless of genre-as an expression of solidarity. The atomized mode returns to the universalism of the countercultural mode-but by default, rather than design. With no urge for context to make culture understandable, everything is equally appealing everywhere. Meanings arrive as bite-sized morsels in a jumbled stream, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Unfortunately, with no binding contexts, nothing makes sense. Everything is equally available everywhere-which is fabulous! Now, there are no boundaries, so bits of culture float free. The previous, subcultural mode failed because individual subcultures did not provide enough breadth or depth of meaning and because cliquish subsocieties made it too difficult to access the narrow meaningness they hoarded. However, there is much to like about atomization, and-I will suggest-it provides vital resources for constructing the next, fluid mode. Overall, my description of the atomized mode may sound like a panicked condemnation. We shake the broken bits together, in senseless kaleidoscopic, hypnotic reconfigurations, with no context or coherence. In our present, atomized mode of meaningness, cultures, societies, and selves cannot hold together.
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