Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind.

The origin of the term “culture” is best documented by the comparative literature scholar Raymond Williams, who charted its appearance in his book Culture and Society, 1780-1950 . At the beginning of the 18th century, “culture” was still only a verb. It meant to cultivate the land, to encourage natural growth: the culture of leeks or potatoes or ga... See more

With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.

The judge of a subculture is not its stated axioms, but the type of people who identify as its members.

The realization that producing culture is about producing types of personhood is the central issue of this new cultural economy.

Before the internet demanded our attention 24/7, television, radio, and lifestyle magazines had a very specific grip on the zeitgeist, combing youth culture to determine the next craze. Now, gauging cool is a far more democratic endeavor, and the escalating speed of digital culture means that fads can come and go before they even peak. Mediated thr... See more

“the concept of authenticity is increasingly deemed inauthentic.”

Mass culture itself has become a subculture — a sort of sideshow to the real action,

People are always seeing and being seen, and in some ways, owning products does constitute one form of cultural participation. Yet it is also clear that owning goods alone is not a really significant sort of participation.