The Year the Monoculture Died

Remember when: Ellen DeGeneres poses for a selfie taken by Bradley Cooper with Jared Leto, Jennifer Lawrence, Channing Tatum, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'o, Angelina Jolie, Peter Nyong'o Jr. and Bradley Cooper during the 86th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on March 2, 2014.

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At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. DeGeneres’ Twitter account posted it immediately afterward, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time.

The selfie was an instantly viral moment in a telecast that drew the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people. The photo (for which Cooper used a phone made by Samsung, a major Oscars sponsor) became a dayslong news cycle unto itself.

No one knew it at the time, but in retrospect the selfie moment feels like the last stand of a shared popular culture that no longer exists. Monoculture didn’t die with Cooper’s selfie, but that night may have been its last peak.

The idea of a monoculture isn’t entirely a benevolent one, obviously — words like “gatekeeping” and “dumbing down” could be substituted for it. And nostalgia is by definition rose-colored. But in a fragmented world — politically, socially, algorithmically — where tech tools have the ability to make people question reality itself, and in an industry that is seeing one-time pillars of creativity reduced (at least potentially) to tiles on another company’s landing page, the idea of a widely shared pop cultural language feels almost romantic.

Kaley Cuoco poses with the cast of The Big Bang Theory at the Hollywood Walk of Fame October 29, 2014 in Hollywood. The CBS series ranked as the No. 1 show with 21.3 million viewers in its 2014-2015 season.

Michael Bay takes a photo with fans in Miami for a special screening of Transformers: Age of Extinction, the top grossing movie worldwide in 2014 with $1.1 billion, not adjusted for inflation.

To rewind a bit: At the time of the Oscar selfie in 2014, social media was ascendant, and both traditional and online media outlets were reaping the benefits of an ecosystem where a favored Facebook post could generate tens of thousands of clicks (the “pivot to video” that would end all that was still a year away). Virality often came in the form of BuzzFeed or Upworthy posts with “What happened next will blow your mind” headlines, a style quickly copied all over the web. Live-tweeting sports (which were all on broadcast or cable TV), big news events or just an episode of American Idol was a way to have a real-time conversation with a few dozen (or a few thousand) of your friends and followers.

It wasn’t just the Oscars that were big that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets were arguably at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in almost 21 million. The Emmy Awards in August 2014 had 15.59 million viewers on NBC — down about 12 percent from 2013 but still a very healthy audience. Five other music awards shows that year brought in at least 10 million viewers.

Regular series thrived as well. In the 2013-14 TV season, two dozen network and cable shows, ranging from The Walking Dead to Downton Abbey, averaged 12 million or more viewers; the top two (The Big Bang Theory and NCIS) had more than 22 million each and even outdrew primetime NFL games after a week of DVR playback.

Streaming was also not really a thing yet. Netflix had made a splash in 2013 with its first original series, House of Cards, but most of the industry still considered it the “Albanian army,” as then Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes dismissively referred to the company in 2010. (Time Warner, incidentally, was still a few years away from its merger with AT&T, which started the cascade that eventually led to its impending engulfment by Paramount Skydance.) When the Oscars aired on March 2, 2014, a total of 14 original streaming shows existed on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon’s Prime Video.

Heck, even the idea of the selfie was still relatively new at the time. The term had been around since the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until Apple installed a front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 in 2010 that they really took off. Facebook had acquired the then two-year-old Instagram, already a repository of millions of selfies, in 2012 but was at least nominally keeping to its pledge to let the app grow on its own. The Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year for 2013, about four months befor