The cultural worth of mash is immaterial to whether or not it has comparable reach to baby shark (i.e. whether or not baby shark is a “shared experience”).
It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.
Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online - it would be disingenuous to write off the entirety of modern popular culture as "shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos." What we lack isn't depth, information and meaning but the power of a unified pop-cultural zeitgeist created by having cultural expression gatekept and controlled by a few broadcasters and media conglomerates.
If you want to know examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced, you have options beyond the blind, scheduled consumption of a single sitcom, however well written.
I do have to wonder how much of that is due to fake accounts.
I was looking over Wikipedia's lists of most watched youtube videos and wondered the same thing there. Lots of them are music videos and I'm sure recording companies are inflating the views to some extent, especially early in.
Fake accounts or no, its hard to find opinions among even smaller bloggers who don't at least tacitly kowtow whatever is debated among the major players in media at the time. You see it even on HN too, with certain regular 'major' storylines finding their way into the frontpage time and time again. We are only ever exposed to a limited set of opinions that fall within a range considered acceptable, given the incentive structures of media.
> Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online
this is true, but none of those are getting tens of billions of views. What spreads the farthest and the fastest are memes and quick hits of dopamine and rage. Those are what comprise our most shared experiences today. I think we'd agree that it's better to not be limited to only those things that have been curated for us by broadcasters and media conglomerates, but between our natural tendency to seek and spread low effort content and the curation of algorithmic gatekeepers optimizing to exploit that tendency our most seen and shared media typically ends up being far more shallow than it used to be.
A few generations ago the most 'viewed video' was mankind's first steps on the moon, an incredible feat of science and engineering that ignited their imaginations. Today ours is Baby Shark.
Comparing numbers between television in the 1960s and modern internet multimedia and then extrapolating that to a comparison of relative cultural impact is disingenuous. Baby Shark is only as viewed as it is because it's an easy way for people to distract their kids.
I don't agree that shared media experiences typically carried more depth and meaning pre-internet than today. You're picking out exceptions to the norm, but the mainstream is always mediocre. Most people weren't watching intellectually stimulating, complex, thought provoking works of art or listening to symphonies - people who watched television were literally referred to as "couch potatoes."
And if there were an event comparable to the Moon landing in cultural import (the closest I can think of in modern memory is COVID) it would of course be all over the internet, rather than localized on a single platform, to be compared to viewing on a single television channel.
> It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.
I don't really think they are comparable in any meaningful way. To bring any comparison we would try to make a little more towards apples-to-apples, let's just consider the subject of war. On one side, let's take the entirety of the MASH run, 250-odd episodes, and on take a handful of 2 minute compilations from the war in Ukraine. IMO more depth, info and meaning about war is more easily accessible from the meme-videos; It's impossible not to be viscerally affected when you watch a grenade drop a couple hundred feet onto some poor bastard below. MASH have may moments like "Keep that damn chicken quiet!" but it just isn't the same, nor as true.
Out of curiosity, when you wonder about "comparability" in this context, what metrics of qualities are you thinking about including in the comparison?
