Remember when whole neighborhoods only had access to the small number of channels that their antennas could capture — before cable, before the internet? Well, I don’t but I’ve heard tell! Nowadays, the experience of a whole block, town, or nation listening or watching the same media is scarce. I relish the feeling of walking through the streets and hearing the same program emanating from every house, car, and sidewalk radio setup. Or an event like the solar eclipse, which brings everyone out onto the street to gaze in the same direction. All eyes fixed with shared anticipation before the event, collective awe during, and the conversations after that shoot off in as many directions as there are individual minds.

“I relish the feeling of walking through the streets and hearing the same program emanating from every house, car, and sidewalk radio setup.”

My love for this shared experience is what keeps me coming back for more — more Superbowls (despite the fact that I reject the sport for the cranial damage it incurs on its players); more episodes of SNL (a show that, while I find it mostly unfunny, has a live aspect which means others are watching now too!); and more Oscars ceremonies. It’s clear these primetime events are fraying at the seams as each of us retreats into the sphere (on YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, pick your poison!) of our preferred niche influencer. This splintering certainly captures something very true and real, namely that we all don’t find ourselves or our interests represented in the prevailing media landscape. Still, isn’t there something lost when we’re all no longer looking in the same direction?

“Isn’t there something lost when we’re all no longer looking in the same direction?”

One way of thinking about this is through the lens of monoculture. Monoculture, in the sociological sense, refers to a dominant strain of popular culture which an entire population takes part in. While critics argue about whether it ever existed, 1950s culture in the U.S. usually furnishes the paradigmatic example of it. But, what is monoculture, in its most technical sense? Stick with me here. It’s the cultivation of a single crop in a given area. This, for anyone who knows a thing about gardening or life in general, might strike you as strange. Producing life requires diversity, so a farming monoculture is destined to fail eventually. At this point, it can employ one of two different strategies: Cycle out the old crop for something new; or evolve the system to include other crops (what is called poly- or inter-cropping).

What can we learn from the use of this word to describe hegemonic culture? By its very nature, monoculture is exclusionary. It’s on this point of diversity that monoculture is most easily criticized since it is always in the business of representing a single type. Rejecting this sameness in the name of flourishing diversity is certainly an admirable project — and one that I am here not trying to stymie! In fact, the way that I like to read this trivia about monoculture is with a focus on how it depends on diversity in order to go on. It’s due to this fact that monoculture puts into relief cultural tensions as it struggles to evolve by taking in difference.

“It’s almost guaranteed that monoculture’s attempt to absorb what is heterogeneous to it will be clumsy.”

It’s almost guaranteed that monoculture’s attempt to absorb what is heterogeneous to it will be clumsy. Who can forget the infamous mishandling of the “Moonlight” Best Picture win? Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, two icons of the old guard, mistakenly announced “La La Land,” a famously white musical about well…Los Angeles, as the winner before a correction was issued. No, the winner was actually “Moonlight,” the story of a young gay Black man living in poverty in Miami. Actually, calling it “clumsy” would be to put it lightly. (Not that it was the fault of Dunaway and Beatty! It seems they were given the wrong envelope.) For the years following — up until 2021 — the award was given to films that we might call “diverse.” There were foreign directors, an exploration of racial dynamics in the bygone American South, and a horror film about class disparity. All the way up until 2021, when a win for “Nomadland” returned the focus to white Americans.

These kinds of fluctuations are always in play with an event like the Oscars. When there are “diverse” winners, Academy voters are often criticized for using their vote as a means of writing off their guilty feelings about the injustices portrayed. And when there aren’t, they are criticized for that too. Trust me, I’m not here to defend the Academy and their decisions! But I do want to suggest that we turn to the Oscars and other cultural moments like it to pose questions. Can we think about what film is chosen and what guilt (or not) it might represent? Can we track across time if one action leads to an opposite reaction down the line? Or perhaps, how a decision by the Academy led to real progress and change? What tensions are alive at the fringes of the monoculture — and what is it trying to absorb?

What will happen this year? I don’t know, but whatever it is, I hope we all wrestle with it together.

Ashley D’Arcy is the Senior Editor at The Good Trade. She holds an MA in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research and has contributed to esteemed outlets such as The Nation, 032c, and Yale School of Management’s Insights where she’s leveraged her expertise in making complex ideas accessible to a broad audience. In addition to her editorial work, she is training as a psychoanalytic mental health professional and provides care to patients in New York City. Ashley also explores sustainable fashion, clean beauty, and wellness trends, combining thoughtful cultural critiques with a commitment to mindful living.