I sort of wonder how much popular culture has not so much given us a unified culture, but rather the illusion of one, that is the worse for the shattering.
To take salient examples from the news today, I think a lot of people imagine that what we see on TV or in the movies is true, when usually, it's just convenient plot devices.
A very, very good friend of mine in college was basically out of Central Casting for mildly douchey frat boy, albeit one with a 3.4 GPA.
He was a virgin through High School and college, until he meant the very pretty, very smart, very sweet girl with the half shaved head and blue hair whom he married. I didn't ask, but I'm pretty sure he went to his wedding a virgin, as well.
Conversely, naked dude, at least slightly inebriated, at a party was hardly an unheard-of event throughout my college years in the mid-to-late 90s.
Naked girl, in similar circumstances, was less common, but also hardly unheard of.
My freshman year, I was asked if I wanted to go streaking. I was in a dorm full of honors students, and I had no idea what that meant. Someone told me. I demurred.
A third of my dorm, male and female, went. Regularly. Until it got very cold.
I would not go, and indeed, would avert my eyes because, let's be honest about this, I've always been more than a bit of a prude.
Of my closest friends through High School, which roughly constituted three separate groups, over 60% of both the boys and girls made it through high school as virgins, a number which fell to about 20% at the end of college.
My friends ranged from socially comfortable people through mildly awkward nerds downright anti-social weirdos. (Though I was often told I was charming, I was definitely in group 2, with tendencies to group 3.)
Popular culture does not deal in these nuances, because popular culture is about telling stories for the lowest common denominator
But well good evil may not be subject to nuance, people's lives assuredly are. I would suggest, however, that the effect of popular culture is to make our experiences seem abnormal insofar as they differ from what's on screen.
The effect of this is increasingly disbelief when someone who seems to have fit a role, and even played it to some extent, breaks from character.
In day-to-day interpersonal reactions, this is one of those things to which the humans can adjust. We are a fairly adaptive species, made such by our Creator, and we can get around incongruity.
In larger, epic, tribal, proxy battles over the fate of our polity, in which our Champions do battle for some approximation of our goals, that sort of adaptation is a dangerous hindrance.
If your whole world is full of avatars who always play to type, allowing for the possibility that one's enemies do not conform to their ideals weakens an army dedicated to ideological vindication.
Man, that was a lot packed into one sentence. Probably should have broken it up.
The point is, I actually think unified popular culture is very bad, not so much for a state with diverse communities, but for a state with diverse communities determined to triumph over each other.
It doesn't start the fire, but it intensifies and accelerates the flames.
