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The End of the Monoculture: Cultural Fragmentation and Shared Identity

Streaming has structurally displaced broadcast media — now 44.8% of US TV usage versus broadcast and cable combined — but the social consequences remain genuinely contested: fragmentation may broaden cultural exposure or merely substitute one algorithmic monoculture for another, and whether social cohesion requires shared cultural content or only shared institutions is a values dispute that data alone cannot settle. The old broadcast monoculture is simultaneously mourned as lost civic glue and indicted as an exclusionary cartel, with non-Western scholars adding that its decline often represents reclamation rather than loss — a tension the briefing maps but does not resolve. Critical causal questions remain open: longitudinal evidence on whether transnational fan communities can substitute for cross-class solidarity, and whether media fragmentation independently drives institutional trust decline or merely tracks economic insecurity and partisan sorting, are both absent from the current literature.

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