This can all become enervating, for a few reasons. (This spring, "Do you watch 'True Detective'?” was lobbed at me more frequently than “How was your weekend?”) Even if only 5 million people listen to "Serial," compared to the tens of millions who watched, say, Seinfeld in the '90s, the former can feel like close to a default topic of conversation more than the latter ever did. But now, from "Serial" to "True Detective," sober-minded adults are “getting hysterically excited about very good but not hugely original cultural products seemingly every other month.” As Paskin notes, the “silo effect of social media” - and the fact that people tend to cluster in homogenized groups - amplifies the apparent universality of such obsessions.
“Adults used to obsess about things in a more steadfast manner, by having long-term interests known as hobbies,” she writes. We live, as Willa Paskin argued at Slate recently, in an age of pop-culture obsession. A refreshing - hell, even liberating - sense of relief that I was permitted, per my lack of interest, to take a break from the ceaseless stream of media that a culturally literate person is expected to keep up with in 2014. But mixed in with the cold detachment, I must confess, lurked another, unignorable emotion: relief - relief that I truly didn’t give a damn about this particular pop-culture phenomenon, and could safely skip it. I have never felt any affinity toward “Star Wars” - my attitude about the franchise could best be described as “which one’s the wookie again?” So I gazed at the trailer-dissecting tweets with a healthy mix of condescension and indifference.
The new “Star Wars” trailer had dropped, and the entire Internet, predictably, couldn’t shut up about it.
Two weeks ago, I was lounging at my parents’ house in Massachusetts over Thanksgiving break, absentmindedly breaking a paper-thin resolution not to stare into my phone all the time, when most of my Twitter feed briefly stopped making absurdist jokes involving the word “bae” and started doing something far more alienating.
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