This is something I've been lamenting for a long time. The lack of shared culture. Sometimes a mega-hit briefly coalesces us, but for the most part everyone has their own thing.

I miss the days when everyone had seen the same thing I had.

I found this the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFhXFuRblg "NBC Nightly News, June 24, 1975" I strongly urge people to watch this, it's 30 minutes but there are many very illuminating insights within. One word for you: Exxon.

While I was young in 1975, I did watch ABC's version of the news with my grandparents, and continued up through high school. Then in the late 1980s I got on the Internet and well you know the rest.

"Back Then", a high percentage of everybody I or my grandparents or my friends came into contact with watched one of ABC, NBC, or CBS news most nights. These three networks were a bit different, but they generally they all told the same basic stories as each other.

This was effectively our shared reality. Later in high school as I became more politically focused, I could still talk to anybody, even people who had completely opposite political views as myself. That's because we had a shared view of reality.

Today, tens of millions of people see the exact same footage of an officer involved shooting...many angles, and draw entirely different 'factual' conclusions.

So yes, 50 years ago, we in the United States generally had a share view of reality. That was good in a lot of ways, but it did essentially allow a small set of people in power to decide that convincing a non-trivial percentage of the US population that Exxon was a friendly, family oriented company that was really on your side.

Worth the trade off? Hard to say, but at least 'back then' it was possible, and even common, to have ground political discussions with people 'on the other side', and that's pretty valuable.

I don't know if it's good or bad but, outside of some megahit films, people mostly don't regularly watch the same TV series. I don't even have live TV myself.