"on an intra-national basis it's increasing. The number of people watching any one channel has dropped significantly over the last twenty years..."
The very fact that your default example of cultural "heterogeneity" is what TV chanel a person choses to watch kind of proves my point. Every evening almost everyone comes home and sits and stares at a light box. All evening, almost all of us swim in a sea of luminescent drivel. If you just zoom out _a little_ and take your eye of the content of the behaviour (what chanel we are watching) and switch to the form of the behaviour (everyone is sitting watching light boxes) you'll witness a truely astonishing homogenization in our use of leisure time, in our use of our selves, a kind of massed habit in which our idiosyncracies, our personalities are expressed by, what, the number we press on the remote control?
you call this heterogenous
Date: 2006-05-17 10:41 pm (UTC)The very fact that your default example of cultural "heterogeneity" is what TV chanel a person choses to watch kind of proves my point.
Every evening almost everyone comes home and sits and stares at a light box. All evening, almost all of us swim in a sea of luminescent drivel. If you just zoom out _a little_ and take your eye of the content of the behaviour (what chanel we are watching) and switch to the form of the behaviour (everyone is sitting watching light boxes) you'll witness a truely astonishing homogenization in our use of leisure time, in our use of our selves, a kind of massed habit in which our idiosyncracies, our personalities are expressed by, what, the number we press on the remote control?