Are pop culture critics living inside bubbles?

Jordan At this point, I think most of the world would accept that we live in bubbles. The digital age has allowed allowed us to surround ourselves with people who enjoy the same things as we do, people who share roughly the same values, who see the world in a similar way. And you can make whatever judgment you want about whether that’s good or bad for the world in general. I’m just saying that that’s how it is. But what happens when people inside some of those bubbles are charged with curating the taste of everyone else? What happens when a subset of critics leaves the general public behind? Does that make them out of touch and irrelevant? Or is it the job of a critic to bring their own particular tastes to pop culture analysis? And does what we are seeing in those circles of pop culture criticism help explain why we are bubbled up in everything from music and movies to politics and the pandemic? And if we are, how do we pop those bubbles?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Yair Rosenberg writes a newsletter called Deep Shtetl or The Atlantic. Hi, Yair.

Yair Rosenberg Hi.

Jordan Why don’t for the purposes of our conversation, and people who haven’t read the piece I’ll kind of walk them through it, but first, tell me what you mean by a bubble for the purposes of what we’re going to talk about today?

Yair Sure. I’m actually thinking about the experience that I had that I write about in the piece as a political reporter, because I’ve covered American elections for some ten years. And in 2016, like many reporters, I had this sort of humbling moment where I was absolutely certain that Donald Trump couldn’t win the Republican nomination for President and then that he couldn’t be elected President. And guess what? He got elected President. And so I tried to figure out why I was so sure of something that clearly didn’t have a real basis in reality. And I realized that a big part of where my information was coming from was feedback from peers on social media and in particular on Twitter, where all the folks I followed, and this doesn’t mean just Progressives, but also Conservatives, the folks that I tended to interact with were anti Trump.

And so I got the sense that anti Trump sentiment was rife across the nation. But it turned out it wasn’t. What I was doing was projecting my preferences and my bubbles preferences onto the broader culture. And that’s what I mean by a bubble. It’s when you’re in an Internet space where something seems like the norm and something seems like reality, but it turns out to be disconnected from what, say, the broader community or your entire country is actually experiencing.

Jordan Now you wrote about how this applies to kind of the most popular of our popular culture. Can you give me some examples of how that kind of discourse is out of step with popular perception? And I’m asking for specific examples, I know you have some in your piece.

Yair So I don’t think I’m the first to have encountered this,listeners and readers will be familiar with the phenomenon I’m talking about, which is you pick up a piece of trendy Internet cultural criticism and it says things like, well, Lin Manuel Miranda, he’s insufferably earnest, he used to be big, but now he’s out of fashion. Or JK Rowling, people used to love Harry Potter, they used to love her. But now that she’s had a turn as somebody who speaks extremely sharply on transgender issues, well, now people don’t like her and people are fleeing her franchises, and she is no longer as popular as she used to be.

Now, the opinions about, say, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton, JK Rowling, Harry Potter, those are legitimate opinions. A critic is entitled to say what people like isn’t actually very good. In fact, often that’s the job of a critic. Where you get dicey is what I talked about before, where you take your preferences and you start projecting them onto the public and saying this thing that I have a problem with or that I’ve outgrown or I no longer like or I never liked, well, the public doesn’t like it either. Because, of course, if you look at the actual measurable statistics about the sales and popularity of, say, Lin-Manuel Miranda, he’s never been more popular. He has the number one album on the Billboard charts. He’s the number one songwriter on the same charts. And that’s because, of course, he scored the Disney movie Encanto. And he has had an extremely popular set of other cultural properties that he’s put out. He put out a Netflix movie. He put out an HBO Max movie. He has a Broadway improv show that just started moving around the country.

And, of course, JK Rowling continues to sell insane numbers of books. As a writer myself, I can tell you that to get on the New York Times bestseller list, people don’t realize you need something like 3000 or so copies sold on the right week. Her recent book for children called The Christmas Pig, which I will never read because I’m not interested, and also I’m Jewish. But it apparently sold something like 60,000 copies in like, the first month. And that’s astounding. Broader audiences are not necessarily playing the role that certain critics and I want to emphasize certain critics, a subset of critics and critics that are particularly found on specific trendy Internet bubbles are suggesting. And I try to understand why this disconnect is taking place.

Jordan What do you think explains the difference between critical perception and popular reality? I understand totally the idea of being immersed in a bubble so that what’s actually happening on the ground comes as a surprise to you. But here we’re also talking about just their perception of the works and the creators. And where does that differing perception come from?

Yair So in the piece, I talk about some different reasons why critics diverge from the audience. And there are some very good and understandable reasons. Think about it in terms of, say, a person who drinks a lot of different kinds of wine or eats a lot of different kinds of cheese, you naturally develop more refined tastes in those areas that are different from the average consumer, the average person. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s completely natural, but it can create a distance between the sorts of things that you appreciate and the sorts of things that the average person appreciates. And the same to be true in culture, in movies. And the best critics, I think, are the ones who take those refined tastes and find a way to relate them to a general audience and explain, here’s something I can open your eyes to and help you to appreciate that you might not have appreciated before, but if you’re not aware of that gap and you’re not able to bridge it, you create a disconnect.

Then you have, though, the sort of phenomenon we’re talking about here, which is where the critics taste diverges from the public. But then the critics start saying that the public actually thinks what the critic thinks. Right, Lin-Manuel Miranda has become cringe. JK Rowling is over. All of these things that aren’t so on the ground. And that can be because if you’re in an online space where your friends and your peers are all agreeing with a particular opinion and it seems very representative, you can think that that is what the world looks like.

And I give some statistics about Twitter in particular in the piece and I talk about how Twitter has been studied by the Pew Research Group, and they found in the United States of America, a little less than a quarter of Americans are even on Twitter. And then of those people, 25% of the less than 25% are responsible for 97% of tweets. You crunch those numbers down and you’re basically seeing that most tweets, almost all tweets come from some 6% of people in the United States. Now, those people could be very interesting. They could be very funny, they could be very wise. But what they are not is a representative sample of what is going on in the United States. And if you use Twitter and your even more narrow slice of Twitter as a proxy for what people are thinking, you will probably come to wrong conclusions like me who thought that Donald Trump couldn’t possibly win an election.

That is sort of the idea that I was trying to bring across in the piece. Just saying these sorts of things, the refined tastes and then the envelopment within a bubble can lead people to misapprehend the culture and then make it harder for them to reach the audiences they want to reach with their cultural criticism. Because I’m not writing to say cultural criticism is bad. I really like it. You don’t write a big essay like I did about something if you despise it. What a waste of time. You write about it because you care about it. When I see this particular trend, it worries me.

Jordan I mean, I will tell you just as a personal example, because we are on to this. When we at the podcast network sit around and talk about our favourite shows, the name Joe Rogan never comes up. However, whenever I go to a party or well, back in the long ago days when I used to go to parties and you start talking about podcasting and people are like, oh, you work in podcasting? You know what my favorite show is? Joe Rogan. I love him. I can’t get enough. And to my mind, I know I’m in a bubble because I can’t stand it. But I’m constantly confronted with the idea of that is what most people see a podcast as.

Yair Exactly. And now the example that would happen in our situation is there’s nothing wrong with somebody saying, I don’t like Joe Rogan. The step where it goes askew is where someone says, nobody likes Joe Rogan. And that becomes strange. And that means us journalists, we’re doing something off, as commentators were doing something off. We’re missing something.

Jordan In your piece, though, you discuss people writing about the creators as being cringe or transphobic or canceled, which I totally get. And again, I inhabit that little corner of the Internet, as I’m sure you do. So it’s not the first time I’ve seen these discussions, but what I’d love to hear from you on is what is the harm in bringing that viewpoint that is probably pretty in depth cultural criticism about transphobia or whether or not they’re addressing the really complicated nuanced issues of politics instead of making a musical. What is the problem with bringing that opinion to a wider audience through cultural criticism? I mean, isn’t that the definition of it? They’re not saying nobody likes this stuff anymore, are they?

Yair Well, so I was critiquing people who were taking those preferences and then projecting them the onto public and saying, if you think that, say, JK Rowling is a transphobe, you can’t just label and lecture, you have to actually educate and explain. And this is true for any sort of political critique that you’re going to level against art or an artist. You can’t assume your audience already agrees or even understands the terms of the conversation. You can, of course, if you’re just writing for your peers who already accept those terms and understand them. But the best, and you know this better than I because you speak to a much wider audience, you want to put things in terms that people can access and reach. One of the things that I found gratifying about my piece is people read it who are, say, left wing activists on Twitter, and they said, this really helped explain to me why I can tweet about some issue in the culture and get tremendous pickup, and yet nothing changes. Because it’s a Mirage.

What’s happening on social media is confirmation bias among my peers, and it appears popular to me. But in point of fact, again, those are 6% of people, it’s not actually the country. And I need to start bringing more people in and reaching more people who are not necessarily in this space and convincing them of my viewpoints. When you’re doing any form of criticism, when you’re criticizing somebody, if you say it in a way they can’t hear it and you don’t put it in their terms of reference and you don’t know where they’re coming from, it’s not going to be very effective criticism.

Jordan Why does it matter if a certain subset of critics are out of step with popular reality? I mean, if that’s the subset, then that’s just the subset. But I guess I’m asking, what harm does it do?

Yair This is not how all critics see themselves, but I think that a lot of critics see themselves as trying to improve the culture. They write about these things because they care about them, and they think that the mass market things we consume tremendously influence how we relate to each other and relate to reality, and they say something about our society. And so when you criticize that, you want to improve it. But when you’re out of step with your audience and you don’t understand how they are processing things and you make assumptions about what they’ll agree with and what you don’t have to explain and what you don’t have to persuade them of, you lose the ability to move the culture and you lose the ability to make it better. And precisely because sometimes I agree with these critiques, it frustrates me to see them being made in such a poor way. And I’m not trying to argue that people shouldn’t make these critiques. I keep saying this. I’m trying to argue that we should make them better.

And this is again, I’m going to bring it back to my day job, which is writing about politics and foreign policy. I think these things are tremendously important. But if you look say, at elections in the United States and polls as citizens, people tend not to vote on things like foreign policy. And some of the other things I write about. I need to understand that, because when I write my articles, I have to go back a few steps and say, here’s why this matters, here’s why it’s important, here’s why you should care, rather than assuming that just because everyone who follows me on Twitter, of course they follow me because they care about these issues, therefore people must care about them. I assume in large part that people don’t. People are really busy. They have jobs, they have families, they have responsibilities. Their job isn’t like mine to care about this stuff and to cover it all the time. And so my goal is to help them see that and not assume they’re bad people for not knowing it and then move things along to a more positive place.

Jordan To that point, you write in your piece that most people are unaware of JK Rowling’s transphobic comments. And I read that, and I’m like, I just don’t think that’s true. Even taking into account the Internet bubble, I think the majority of people know it or have heard something about it, but are also able to separate JK Rowling, however old she is now woman who no longer is creating this series from the seven Harry Potter books that they’re going to pass on to their kids. And that, to me, is where popular criticism gets into a real minefield. It’s not necessarily the bubble, which is obviously a part of that, but it’s extrapolating that value onto the art itself. We can also talk about all the problematic stuff in the Harry Potter series, but it’s not about that, right. It’s about being able to separate the fact that this woman, whatever you think of her 15 years after the book is finished, is an entirely separate entity from the seven books.

Yair I could have written an entire separate essay about just the question of separating the art from the artist, because, like you, I think that there’s a more complicated story to be told here. And this comes from a certain sense from my Jewish background, which is Jews for centuries didn’t have the luxury of not reading people who said problematic things about us, because if we did that, there wouldn’t have been much left to read. And it’s kind of amusing to watch people wake up to this conundrum and saying, well, yeah, we’ve been having this conversation forever. You read Shakespeare, you read Charles Dickens, read Dostoyevsky.

I interviewed the novelist and author Dara Horn, who recently published a well received book called People Love Dead Jews. And she has a whole chapter in there about portrayals and apologia for Shylock, who is an antisemitic caricature in The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare. And she says she has a whole bunch of reasons why she says we shouldn’t cancel, so to speak, whatever bad word, literature for its problematic elements. But she said it’s also just completely impractical because you will quickly run out of anything possible to read. And so I think that that’s something people should keep in mind.

And the healthier way is to teach people how to engage constructively with literature that has positive and negative elements and to realize that people expand if you give them the space to do so, educators will tell you this. If you set the bar a certain level, often students will attain it. But if you have low expectations and say, well, this book is problematic. You just shouldn’t read it because you’ll just be immediately brainwashed by it. Well, you have a very low opinion of your audience, and the goal to bring us back to cultural criticism is sort of to help people process things rather than to treat certain things as anathema. And I think that’s a really helpful way that cultural critics can help people deal with any sort of work that comes from any sort of problematic leader or has problematic choices. But it’s not by saying this is bad, we should put it on the bad list because one, again, you will be disconnecting from the audience. But two, I don’t think that’s actually the most mature way to relate to culture.

Jordan That makes a lot of sense to me. And I mean, we could talk about art versus the artist forever. But the last thing I want to ask you before I let you go is one of my senses from the Internet in general today, but also specifically social media, is that it’s not becoming more United, it’s becoming more and more fractured and more and more niche. And the further down the rabbit hole you go, the more likely you are to find only people who think about things the same way as you do. So is there any reconciliation of critical and popular views on the horizon, or are we just going to continue to fracture into smaller and smaller bubbles?

Yair It’s a great question. I think about it a lot, because as a journalist, my goal is, in fact, to reach and move the largest number of people with stories about things that I think are important and how to do that in an incredibly fractured landscape. It becomes harder and harder every day. I do think that when it comes to cultural criticism, it’s a little bit easier, which is to say that the way people should relate to criticism is you need to find a critic who jibes with you, who seems to understand your needs, who seems to have similar taste to you, but be more advanced and along the way, because if you’re really a critic who doesn’t share your taste, you’re just going to be angry all the time. And the trick is to find a taste maker, to find a guide who can expand your Horizons, but is on a similar wavelength. And this is true with mentors in general.

And so the fragmentation doesn’t have to be bad for cultural criticism. It’s just a matter of people being able to find the thing that they need. But I do think that it would help journalists and writers of all sorts to think, how can I reach the widest possible audience? How can I speak to those designated normal folks in my life and find out what’s engaging them and what’s not? And that doesn’t mean therefore I only write about the things that people are talking about, and I don’t write about the other things, because sometimes those other things are very important. But it’s important to know if people aren’t thinking about those things and aren’t talking about them, that you need to do more and extra careful work in order to explain to them why they should care about that thing. And I think that if we were more in touch with the people who we’re writing for, we discover that we can reach more people than we think. It’s just a matter of doing a little bit more work on what our audiences are experiencing in their day to day lives.

Jordan Yair, thank you so much for this, it’s fascinating.

Yair Well thank you very much.

Jordan Yair Rosenberg writing for The Atlantic. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can explore our own little bubble. You can also talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN and add us to your bubble. And you can email us thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!] to tell us why you think we’re full of crap.

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Stefanie Phillips is the lead producer of this show. Joseph Fish and Braden Alexander are our associate producers. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, have a great weekend, watch whatever you like, and we’ll talk Monday.

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