“Have you watched this?” was once a question that everyone knew how to answer.
It might have been about a favourite TV series, blockbuster movie, or a cricket game, but the point is that people from millions of households watched the same thing at more or less the same time. They gathered around one TV set, talked about their favourite scenes with classmates the following day, and large cultural events became topics that everyone could discuss.
Nowadays, however, everything has changed.
Launch a Netflix account or an Instagram page with your friend. The chances are high that the two of you will find yourself watching something totally different – one person will have a feed full of K-pop videos, another one will be watching Formula 1 highlights, and the third one will spend the whole day watching anime or videos about cooking. Online streaming services and social networks personalise the content of every online session according to your preferences and interests.
That is why many people think that a shared culture has gone extinct. But has it?
The Age of Endless Choice
Contrary to the television that existed in the early 2000s, nowadays’ audience has access to virtually endless entertainment opportunities through streaming, YouTube, and social media, offering the ability to watch millions of videos, listen to music, or watch movies without being tied to the schedule of television.
Chris Anderson, in his 2004 article for Wired magazine, ‘The Long Tail,’ had anticipated such development when he claimed that people would be able to get rid of blockbuster movies and discover their niches due to online services that would not be limited by shelf capacity (Anderson, 2004).
To some extent, Anderson was right about it.
Today, people are willing to label themselves as K-pop fans, Formula 1 fans, anime fans, Swifties or gamers. It has become easy for people to find like-minded people in the online world thanks to online communities despite the place they live in.
However, there is another story.
Do We Really Watch Different Things?
Despite an increase in the range of entertainment programs that people can access, audiences prefer watching a few extremely popular programs.
As reported in Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Music Report, streaming music accounted for 253 million tracks at the end of 2025. However, nearly 120.5 million songs have been listened to ten or fewer times during the entire year, whereas only 29 songs achieved the level of one billion streams across the globe (Luminate, 2026).
It means that although there is a lot of different content available today, only a few pieces become extremely popular.
The same conclusion was made by Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse, who argued that the era of blockbuster entertainment did not end and audiences are concentrated around a few extremely popular movies, songs, and TV shows (Elberse, 2008).
Are Algorithms Really to Blame?
One can easily come to the conclusion that the algorithms are building their own worlds. But research says this is only one of the reasons.
A paper that was published in the journal Science examined how more than 10 million Facebook users consumed political news. Scientists discovered that even though there was an influence of the Facebook algorithm on what people consume, the influence of users themselves was much bigger (Bakshy, Messing & Adamic, 2015).
It can be explained by the fact that algorithms always react to our interests and not invent new ones for us.
It means that our feed is personalised, but it is not isolated from the general cultural trends; and these trends definitely do not disappear.
No matter whether it is a World Cup football game, a movie or a meme on social media, there are some events that gather millions of people in one place at once.
So, the claim that we live in an age without shared culture could be false.
It seems like the culture just has changed its form.
What Still Brings Us Together?
If our everyday entertainment is becoming more personalised, what still creates shared experiences?
The biggest answer is live events.
There are certain events that need to be experienced live rather than watched afterwards. It could be the Cricket World Cup, an IPL final, or a large-scale music concert that people want to experience live. The live watching will also involve the social media conversations and interactions that will happen around it.
One of the strongest examples of shared culture in India is cricket. As per the International Cricket Council (ICC), the India vs. England semi-final during the 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup gathered 65.2 million live audiences on JioHotstar and created a world record for the highest-ever live digital sports viewing event globally (ICC, 2026).
Similarly, blockbuster films continue to unite audiences despite the rise of streaming. Ormax Media’s India Box Office Report (H1 2026) found that the first half of 2026 recorded ₹6,398 crore in box office collections, the strongest performance since the pandemic. The report also showed that the top 15 films accounted for 58% of the total box office revenue, proving that audiences still gather around major releases (Ormax Media, 2026).
These numbers show that while people have more entertainment choices than ever before, they still come together for cultural events that feel significant.
Shared Culture Looks Different Today
However, shared culture has not vanished; instead, it has become even more varied.
In today’s world, a person can be a fan of K-pop, Formula 1 racing every weekend, enjoy watching anime, and at the same time feel happy about the Indian team’s victory in a cricket tournament. Nowadays, our interests are not confined to one type of entertainment only.
Moreover, social media has changed how we take part in culture. Once upon a time, the audience could just watch. Today, however, it also creates. Memes, fan edits, movie reviews, theories, and discussions about them all are posted on the internet. Reels and audio files become part of the global discussion in several hours.
For example, there is the Spotify Wrapped service. Each December, millions of users post their personalised summaries on the internet. Even though every summary is individual, the process itself becomes an online event where everyone compares their playlists and listening behaviour. According to the researchers Taylor Annabell and Nina Vindum Rasmussen, it becomes an “algorithmic event” (Annabell & Rasmussen, 2025).
Therefore, personalisation does not necessarily separate people.
So, Is Shared Culture Disappearing?
Culture is constantly evolving rather than disappearing.
It would seem that the problem here is not whether shared culture exists or not; the issue here is the accessibility of its current form.
One cannot say that one type of culture exists for everybody. On the contrary, modern people are part of many different groups, and while their entertainment might be personalised, important experiences have the power to attract millions of viewers.
In a world in which it seems like every person watches his/her own content, there is still connection among people. It does not happen due to the uniform consumption of entertainment but because people keep coming together for important moments in the same way as before.
Image credits : Museu Valencià d’Etnologia, sala Secà i Muntanya, carro de televisions by Joanbanjo | Own work, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
