When everybody knew the words

Somebody starts singing the Gilligan’s Island theme and every Gen Xer in the room joins in before the first line is over. It happens because we were all formed by the same things, and it provides a shortcut to connection that needs no explanation and no context-setting. My sons are early Gen Z. They light up the same way when they meet an age peer who watched the same YouTube videos as kids. But their experience isn’t universal, as my Gilligan’s Island experience is. Their generation’s formation was fragmented. I had three TV networks. They grew up with cable’s 100 channels and with algorithmically sorted feeds that gave every kid something slightly different. They’d find something on YouTube and share it with their school friends, and their school would develop its own common media language. But when they’d meet someone from a different school, the references didn’t always carry, because that school centered around its own set of videos. What mass culture gave us wasn’t really about…