One day I was riding in the car with my parents and we were listening to XM Radio, "60's on 6". The station only plays songs that were released during the 1960's. I couldn't help but notice that my parents knew almost every song...and when they didn't know a song, they thought it was strange that they had never heard it before.
This made me wonder what songs XM Radio would play if they had a station that only played songs that were released between 2000 and 2010...and I quickly realized that there would probably be a lot of songs I wouldn't recognize. Right now, I have over 2,000 songs in my music library and I feel like that is a pretty average number. But, if you were to compare my library to a random person's, I bet we wouldn't have many of the same songs. Even though I love the music that I listen to just as much as the next person loves the music that they listen to, if we aren't listening to the same music, is it weakening our culture?
In 1965, music wasn't as available as it is today, at least not in such copious amounts...and it definitely was not as easy to store all in one place. While those may seem like negative things, I think it made that generation's cultural identity stronger.
The massive amounts of music, television, news and other kinds of culture we are exposed to on a daily basis is great; you can find a niche that you really love and immerse yourself in it. BUT, has the technology (MP3 players, DVRs, satellite radio, etc) that has enabled us to explore all of these options actually weakened the overall sense of commonality across our generation?
