The mainstream is dead.

There's no doubt in my mind. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But the mainstream will stand in history as a peculiarity of the 20th Century. Here's what I mean. In 1980 there were three networks and for the most part radio played top 40 music.

That doesn't happen anymore. Have you been in a music store recently? Have you looked in the Alternative section? Johnny Cash is alternative. Willie Nelson is alternative. There's no such thing as alternative, anymore. Everything is alternative. Culture is all alternate. And this is the end of mainstream.

It's not even easy anymore going into work and talking about what you watched on TV because most people don't watch what you watch, or worse, they've got something better to do. And of course, the world wide web.

Similarly, markets have grown and fragmented too. Nobody markets to everybody anymore. Except maybe Disney. There's the youth market, the seniors market, the gay market, the female market, the male market, the executive market, the single mother's market.

Mainstream was a temporary byproduct of growing media. Media has overgrown the idea of the mainstream.

The only mainstream we have kept, I think, is an aberration of one of the earliest forms of mass media: yellow journalism. We have doomed ourselves to continue stalking our celebrities en masse. But even that is only as small or as big as the total number of celebrities we can support. Yes, the only shared cultural experience left for us is talking endlessly about the grotesque media fiascos of the Jacksons, of Spears and Aguilera and Timberlake and the Hiltons which might just be really sad.

SS