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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed a similar trend - I am now in my 40s, and we played games, read comic books, watched TV and movies growing up... but we never made them part of our self-identity. But recently, people's media consumption is part of their identity. From Whovians to Bronies, people are starting to treat their entertainment as core pieces of who they are.

I find it odd. But maybe that is just part of getting old... that you don't quite understand the youth of today.

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Same as it ever was. Trekkies. Yankees fans. Smiths fans. Goths. Deadheads. Beatlemania. Hippies. The Beats. Greasers. Flappers. Oscar Wilde fans. We didn't invent popular culture this generation.

The difference is, we have the Internet to actually create large communities centered around these interests. This makes it look like more people are involved, when in fact all the separate islands of fans have simply been bridged together.

And the internet has enabled those fans to be continuously engaged in their interests.

Where trekkies/ham operators/beatlemaniacs might have assembled once in a while or yearly at a convention, now they can stay with their tribe all the time. What's the cultural impact when that happens?

My knee-jerk reaction is to say the people become more insular, but perhaps the opposite is true.

If trekkies come from all over the country, from different age groups, backgrounds, perhaps interacting with your internet trekkie tribe all day will give you a broader picture of things.

In that sense it may be an exchange of intellectual depth for breadth. In a time of a broad globalism that may be just the sort of population you want.

What's more, generally the shared interest is used as a social glue, not as a sole topic of discussion. Case in point, the fact that on Hacker News we are discussing this.

I have a freind and co-worker who is on the more extreme end of the "brony" spectrum. He's still plenty capable of interacting with those of us who've never seen an episode of MLP.

Didn't ham operators talk to each other all night long over random and often amazing distances? That was kind of the point.

Okay, yeah, bad example. I was trying to think of groups that actually met F2F in the days before the Internet.

To be sure I read you well: you state that people are actually defining their identity by consuming media which would be different than knowing you are being influence by contemporary culture on some level, right ? (I tend to agree).

I actually think that marketers have simply gotten better.

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