Mourning the Monoculture

For most of my working life, I believed there was an audience out there.

Not one audience that agreed about everything, watched every program, or listened to the same radio station. But there was a broad public that shared enough names, stories, songs, events, and cultural references for a broadcaster to speak to it.

A person who never watched baseball could still tell you who was playing in the World Series. You did not have to watch Dallas every week to hear people asking, “Who shot J.R.?” Many Americans could name foreign leaders because ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the same major international events.

Cable television was growing, but plenty of families still did not have it. Even for those who did, much of cable consisted of reruns, old movies, sports, music videos, shopping channels, and strange little corners of television that had not yet swallowed the living room whole.

Grandma knew who Madonna was, even if she preferred Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra.

We were not all watching the same program, but we usually knew what everyone else was talking about.

I built radio programs for that world. My Mother Road Morning Show was created for people moving through the same morning at roughly the same time. Victors and Villains of Northeast Oklahoma, my five-minute radio biography featuring local heroes and zeros, depended on pure fear of missing out.

The program used music, sound effects, historical recordings, quotations, and narration. The subjects ranged from Mickey Mantle to Ma Barker and others who had left their footprints, muddy or otherwise, on local history.

But if you were not listening when it aired, you missed it.

That world did not disappear overnight. It weakened over generations as our civic institutions, shared culture, media habits, and technology changed. Understanding that change helped me understand why I eventually had to stop thinking only like a broadcaster and learn to think like a marketer.

Tocqueville and the American Habit of Gathering

When the French Nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he noticed that Americans had a habit of forming associations. Whenever they wanted to support a cause, solve a problem, influence public opinion, build an institution, or improve their community, they gathered.

They formed churches, charities, newspapers, political organizations, business groups, and civic societies. Tocqueville believed those associations helped democracy function because they brought citizens into shared concerns and gave ordinary people a way to influence public life. He called the ability to form associations the “mother science” of a democratic society.

America did not merely share information. Americans shared institutions, responsibilities, and conversations.

Those institutions placed people in regular contact with neighbors who did not always think exactly as they did. Citizens learned how to organize, cooperate, argue, compromise, and complete work together. Newspapers helped connect those groups by showing people what others were building, debating, or protesting.

Tocqueville was not describing a media monoculture. He was describing the habit of gathering that made a shared public life possible.

Radio and television later expanded that conversation. A town meeting could reach a neighborhood. A radio station could reach a county. A television network could place millions of people in front of the same speech, news event, sporting contest, or sitcom.

Broadcasting gave a much larger audience a common cultural vocabulary.

The Strengths and Limits of the Monoculture

The monoculture did not mean everyone

believed the same thing or consumed exactly the same entertainment. It meant enough people knew the same stories and references for a broad conversation to exist.

That shared vocabulary made broadcasting powerful. An announcer could mention a movie, song, celebrity, news event, or television program and reasonably expect much of the audience to recognize it. A local radio station could speak to farmers, factory workers, teachers, store owners, teenagers, grandparents, and elected officials through the same transmitter. The station was not simply delivering music and information. It was helping maintain a local conversation.

That system was never perfect. Powerful broadcasters and publishers decided which subjects deserved attention and which voices remained outside the gate. Some communities were ignored, stereotyped, or represented poorly. Cable television, independent media, and the internet opened doors that needed to be opened.

People gained access to subjects traditional media rarely covered. Musicians could find listeners without a major record label. Small businesses could communicate without purchasing access to a printing press or broadcast tower. Communities could tell their own stories instead of waiting for someone else to notice them.

Fragmentation created freedom, but it also weakened the common reference points that allowed one message to reach a broad public.

Bloom, Putnam, and the Weakening Common Ground

In 1987, philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom focused largely on higher education, serious reading, philosophy, music, cultural relativism, and the intellectual development of young Americans. He believed universities had become less confident about passing along the books and ideas that once formed a shared intellectual inheritance.

Bloom was controversial, and I do not agree with every conclusion he reached. That is not the point. His concern matters to a broadcaster because communication depends on recognition. A joke, quotation, song cue, historical comparison, or movie reference works because the audience understands what it points toward. When fewer people share those references, a communicator must explain more, narrow the audience, or accept that part of the message will drift past unnoticed.

While Bloom saw a weakening cultural vocabulary, political scientist Robert Putnam documented a decline in the physical institutions where Americans built relationships.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam described Americans becoming increasingly disconnected from friends, neighbors, local organizations, and democratic institutions. He used the term “social capital” for the trust, relationships, and habits of cooperation created through those connections.

The title captured the problem beautifully. Americans had not necessarily stopped bowling. They had stopped bowling together. A bowling league was not socially valuable only because people bowled. It required participants to show up, follow rules, keep score, speak to teammates, tolerate personalities, and return the following week. Churches, unions, civic clubs, neighborhood associations, local newspapers, and service organizations created similar repeated encounters. As those spaces weakened, Americans did not stop wanting information, identity, companionship, recognition, and belonging.

The internet offered somewhere else to find them.

From the Town Square to the “Daily Me”

By 2000, Nicholas Negroponte’s vision of digital life was becoming real.

Who had an AOL, Yahoo!, or Hotmail account? Who bookmarked favorite websites and returned to them every day? Who found an online forum devoted to a hobby, profession, political belief, television show, celebrity, historical subject, or wonderfully obscure interest? This nerdy guy certainly did.

At first, it felt liberating. Instead of accepting whatever appeared on television, radio, or the front page of the newspaper, we could assemble our own media world.

In Being Digital, Negroponte described a future of electronic information tailored around individual interests. The concept became known as the “Daily Me,” a personalized publication containing the stories each reader wanted while omitting much of the rest.

The older organizations Putnam described were usually rooted in place. People attended the same church, school, lodge, Chamber meeting, bowling alley, union hall, or town council meeting because they lived near one another.

Digital communities required no shared location. They could form around interests, identities, professions, hobbies, political beliefs, grievances, entertainment, or a shared sense of humor.

Social media did not completely replace civic organizations and physical gathering places. It did, however, absorb many of their functions. It offered information, entertainment, debate, companionship, organization, identity, and a sense of belonging.

We had not stopped gathering. We had started gathering somewhere else.

Cass Sunstein recognized the danger inside that convenience. In Republic.com, and later in #Republic, he argued that personalized media could reduce the unexpected encounters a healthy democracy needs. Social platforms could sort people into groups of the like-minded, reinforce existing views, and make common ground harder to find.

A printed newspaper might place a city hall report, international story, sports result, political column, wedding announcement, and tractor advertisement inside the same package. Readers encountered subjects they had not deliberately selected.

A personalized feed could quietly remove the unexpected.

At the time, social media was still commonly called social networking, and “algorithm” was not yet a household word. Nevertheless, Sunstein saw the direction of travel. The technology promised to connect everyone while making it easier for each person to occupy a different information world.

The neighborhood was no longer only where we lived. It was where we clicked.

The Center Weakens and Tribes Become Valuable

Writers from different political perspectives began identifying other parts of the same

problem.

In his book Independent Nation, John Avlon defended political independence and solutions drawn from the center rather than rigid pressure from either ideological edge. Ronald Brownstein approached the issue through elections, demographics, political institutions, and incentives. In his book, The Second Civil War, he described forces pulling American politics toward the margins and leaving little common ground for compromise.

Bloom saw a weakening cultural inheritance. Putnam saw declining civic participation. Negroponte imagined personalized information. Sunstein warned about filtered environments. Avlon defended a political center becoming harder to maintain. Brownstein described polarization becoming embedded in the political system.

They did not share the same politics, field of study, or diagnosis. They were describing different pieces of the same storm.

While writers debated the social consequences, broadcasters recognized a business opportunity. Talk radio demonstrated that a program did not have to appeal equally to everyone. It could become essential to a specific and deeply loyal audience.

Brian Jennings understood that world from inside the industry. He served as national vice president of talk programming for Citadel Broadcasting and oversaw programming for dozens of radio stations. His book Censorship: The Threat to Silence Talk Radio defended the influence and independence of the format.

My larger takeaway from that era was not simply that conservative talk radio worked. It was that a clearly defined and committed audience could be more valuable than a large but mildly interested one.

Radio had always separated audiences through formats. Country listeners went one direction. Rock listeners went another. News and talk listeners went somewhere else. Talk radio went further by building identity, loyalty, language, and the feeling that the listener belonged to something.

Social media automated what radio programmers had learned through experience. Instead of a program director deciding what might keep an audience listening, algorithms could measure what individuals clicked, watched, replayed, ignored, shared, argued about, and purchased.

The digital neighborhood was not merely where we clicked. It was being rebuilt around every click.

The Broadcaster Watches the Audience Move

Locally, these changes did not immediately feel like a cultural crisis.

As a radio station manager, I was not especially worried that listeners might choose the country station in the next town. Competition between stations had always existed. The larger danger was stagnation.

Radio stations had websites, email addresses, streaming tools, and eventually Facebook pages. But many of us treated those technologies as accessories to broadcasting rather than signs of a new relationship with the audience.

The radio station remained the main event. The website was where we posted weather forecasts, school closings, contest rules, and pictures of the morning crew. Facebook became another bulletin board. Streaming was simply the transmitter coming through a computer.

Meanwhile, the audience was learning that it no longer had to wait for us. For several years, I heard business owners say they were advertising on Facebook because it was free. That should have been a warning flare over the radio tower.

The station across town was not the greatest threat. The real threat was failing to notice that listeners were beginning to gather somewhere else.

I had always created content, although we did not usually call it content. Much of it was designed to disappear after it aired. I might save a recording of the Mother Road Morning Show for my own amusement, but no one expected the entire program to be replayed, searched, clipped, shared, or permanently archived.

Radio was immediate. Once the words left the transmitter, they floated away.

Some recordings had a longer life. Interviews could be cut into short excerpts for newscasts. In radio, we called those excerpts “actualities.” Rather than having an announcer summarize an interview, the audience could hear the mayor, sheriff, coach, business owner, or witness speak in their own voice.

Even those recordings usually served a brief purpose.

Social media changed the life expectancy of communication. A broadcast had been a moment. A digital post could remain visible, collect comments, travel through shares, appear in searches, and return months or years later.

Communication was no longer simply a station speaking to an audience. It became an ongoing conversation, and every business, church, organization, broadcaster, and individual gained the ability to operate a small media outlet. The audience had not vanished. It had become atomized into thousands of smaller communities.

Current media use makes that split visible. Edison Research reported in 2026 that 81% of Americans age 12 and older had listened to online audio during the previous month. Pew Research Center found that 52% of adults got local news from radio at least sometimes in 2025, while the same percentage used online forums or discussion groups for local information, up from 38% in 2018.

Radio is not dead. It simply no longer owns the entire road.

A local station competes not only with another station, but with Spotify, YouTube, podcasts, audiobooks, streaming television, social media, and every notification arriving through the listener’s phone.

The battle is no longer between stations. It is a battle for attention itself.

The Broadcaster Becomes a Marketer

Eventually, I had to accept that knowing how to create a message was no longer enough. I had to learn how to find the audience.

Old marketing often said, “Catch us at 7.”

Modern marketing says, “We will find you whenever you are ready.”

Broadcasting lived by a schedule. Digital marketing lives by behavior.

I carried the useful parts of broadcasting into marketing: storytelling, timing, editing, local knowledge, production instincts, audience awareness, and the discipline of making a point before someone changes the station.

But the central question changed.

Broadcasting asked, “What can we say that will interest a large part of the community?”

Marketing asks, “Which community are we trying to reach, where has it gathered, and what matters to it?”

That is a harder question. It is also why simply posting more material is not a strategy.

Every business now has access to a camera, social accounts, design templates, advertising platforms, and audience dashboards. Every business can operate its own small media outlet.

But owning a transmitter does not mean anyone is listening.

Modern marketing requires research, positioning, repetition, judgment, and an understanding of human behavior. It means recognizing that the homeowner watching a remodeling video on Facebook may be different from the person watching a dance trend on TikTok, even when both live in the same town.

The message cannot simply be louder. It has to be more deliberate.

Artificial Intelligence and the Next Adjustment

Artificial intelligence is the newest adjustment. AI can help a small business research an audience, compare patterns, organize information, test ideas, improve a draft, create visuals, and accomplish work that once required a much larger team.

For a small marketing and content studio, that matters. I can use AI to examine a subject from several angles, identify questions I have not considered, work through large amounts of information, test language, and extend what I can produce for a local client.

But AI is a double-edged sword. The same technology can fill news feeds with endless articles, synthetic voices, generic graphics, imitation photography, recycled advice, and advertising produced faster than any audience could absorb. It can help us understand a fragmented culture while adding more noise to it.

I often tell clients that everyone has a hammer, but few people can actually build a house.

AI is the newest hammer. It can make the work faster and place powerful research and production tools into the hands of a small business owner. But access to a tool is not the same as mastery of a craft. Even among trained carpenters, some build stronger, cleaner, and more thoughtful work than others.

AI can generate a headline, summarize research, suggest an audience, or create an image. It cannot automatically determine which message matters, which customer is worth pursuing, when to speak, when to remain quiet, or how all the pieces should fit together.

The tool is widely available. Judgment is not.

Finding the Listener Again

Tocqueville saw Americans gathering around shared purposes. Broadcasting expanded those conversations and gave the country a common cultural vocabulary. Bloom saw that vocabulary weakening. Putnam watched civic participation decline. Negroponte imagined personalized information. Sunstein warned about filtered environments. Avalon defended a shrinking political center. Brownstein documented the loss of common ground. Jennings represented a radio industry learning the value of loyal tribes.

I watched those changes eventually reach the radio station. I entered broadcasting believing the audience was gathered around the radio. I became a marketer when I realized the audience had scattered.

Today, artificial intelligence helps me study those fragments, recognize patterns, improve my work, and find people who may never listen to the same station, watch the same television program, or read the same newspaper.

But AI cannot rebuild the monoculture. It cannot manufacture common ground or create trust. Those still require human beings willing to listen, understand one another, and say something worth hearing.

I did not stop being a broadcaster when I became a marketer. I stopped assuming everyone was listening to the same station. AI can help me find the listener. The responsibility for what I say next still belongs to me.

Woodruff Media helps local and regional businesses find their audience, clarify their message, and create marketing built around real people rather than empty noise.

---

AI disclaimer: AI was used to assist with research, proofreading, idea clarity, graphics, and thumbnail creation. The experiences, opinions, conclusions, and final editorial decisions are the authors.

---