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I was recently interviewed by Omar Oakes for a feature in Campaign magazine. Below is an excerpt from the feature:
Is social media breaking apart the bonds of popular culture through which brands communicate with consumers?
David Beer, a professor of sociology at the University of York, has warned that online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat "fragment cultural consumption". In an interview with Campaign to discuss his latest book, The Quirks of Digital Culture, Beer argues that the diversity and volume of online content that people consume today makes it increasingly difficult to identify behavioural trends.
Because these social media platforms seek to optimise attention, their algorithms tend to create individualistic consumption patterns that make users detached from a common culture.
Beer explains: "The diversity of cultural content that people are engaging with is quite difficult to gauge, because they’re consuming across different platforms and different types of things. Even if you speak to people, it can be quite difficult to identify what they’ve consumed, because they’ve consumed so many different things in a day. You may take a group that live in the same area, but their cultural reference points are all different, because they’ve all been consuming different cultural forms through these platforms."
If you are interested in reading more, the full article is available here.