Our new shared culture

Previous generations had shared culture in the form of television. Virtually everyone watched TV, and, before the advent of cable and satellite TV, people were limited to a few stations and watched many of the same program. Now, it is much more rare to find someone who watches the same television programs as you (especially for me since I don’t watch TV).

Our new shared culture comes in the form of the Internet! This fact occurred to me again when I checked twitter this morning (Please add me!) to find that Jeff Cannata, a co-host of one of my favorite video podcasts, The Totally Rad Show, had tweeted the latest shirt.woot. Woot is one of my favorite sites! It’s a very cool one-item-per-day store that has a single super-cheap item every day. They recently diversified to offer a single very cool and cheap shirt every day hence shirt.woot. Woot is fairly popular. I don’t really know how popular it is, but it’s obviously no Google. I am totally stoked that Jeff also likes it.

This seemingly insignificant act opened an entire stream of consciousness about how we share this culture even though it is much larger than TV could ever be. We share it with people we’ll never meet who live thousands of miles away as well as those down the street. We share it faster than before. Most importantly, we participate by creating that which is being shared.