Adrienne Matei is a journalist for publications including the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Vanity Fair, The Globe, and The Guardian. She writes about the intersection of online and offline culture from Gen Zer Tik Tok trends to the digital afterlife.

The past decade has seen political polarisation – accelerated by social media’s filter bubbles and echo chambers – deepen and mutate. An ominous era of a polycrisis has shattered any remaining societal consensus. Meanwhile, powerful anti-establishment voices have stepped into the void.

Polarised Populations

In 2020, researchers at Brown and Stanford Universities released findings suggesting that the United States had become more polarized in the preceding 40 years than other countries including Canada, the UK, and Germany. 

Brown University

 Political divisions ahead of the 2020 election were so extreme that 90% of both Democratic and Republican registered voters were worried that a victory by the other side would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the US. 

 And a separate survey conducted in 2022 highlighted that more than 40% of Americans think civil war is likely to occur within a decade. 

The Guardian

Racial violence and changes in the demographics of the Democratic and Republican parties have played a role in America’s increased polarization. The COVID-19 pandemic, which split views along lines of science and institutional trust, further contributed to social divisions. 

Also significant is the role played by partisan cable news – influential, ideologically-charged channels like Fox News that impose an agenda that leaves viewers “with a warped understanding of factual reality,” noted David Broockman, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, in a press release about a study on the effects of partisan news on the public. 

Yale University

Yet one needn’t be watching Tucker Carlson to internalize signals about the state of American politics. Victoria Johnson, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of 

Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for US Identity

 both of which analyze entertainment media’s political and cultural significance. For her, TV in all of its iterations is the central cultural forum for working through questions of community ideals, struggles over “representations of geographic mythologies,” and questions of representative citizenship. It’s the ultimate lens through which to observe – and critique – cultural attitudes, norms, and constructions that inform America’s understanding of itself, and a place where “a multi-generational, multiracial, cross-geographic audience could get together,” she explains. 

Interview with Victoria Johnson conducted by the author

 As televised media moves away from broadcast networks and toward the individualized format of streaming – a market expected to be worth $1.69 trillion by 2029, up from £473 billion in 2022 – how will it direct Americans’ sense of national and individual identity and their visions of the American Dream? 

Yahoo

Historically, America as a country has imagined itself as a patchwork of regional differences. “You can only think of yourself as a combined nation by holding up an ‘other’ in some way, and in the 1960s, this very prominently happened in television, particularly in documentaries [about] the South,” says Johnson. To the consumers of mid-20th century mainstream media, the South was “an alien place that was contradictory to national interest” while the North was “somehow more enlightened in terms of race” – both unfounded constructions. 

Johnson adds that prime-time TV also depicted the Midwest as a “zone of nostalgia, Whiteness, and safety in the national imagination” – a site of kitsch Americana sentiments (barns, casseroles, down-home values) that people to this day totter between cherishing and leaving in the past. The truth, says Johnson (who grew up in the Midwest), is that the region has always been racially diverse far beyond how it is represented in media, and the disparity between the idea and reality of the Midwest has had a “long-lasting impact on the actual everyday life” of residents who absorbed decades of cultural omission from their own homeland. 

Johnson explored media depictions of the Midwest in her first book and believes her colleague, Reece Peck, created the work’s intellectual successor in his 2019 book, 

, which examines “the ways in which the aesthetics of Fox TV both claim a national relevance but also are very overtly constructing a polarized, overtly populist space through aesthetics,” she says. 

 In this space, news anchors adopt faux blue-collar personas in an attempt to brand relatively narrow conservative views as broadly ‘working class’ and in opposition to the values of ‘coastal elites’. 

Fox Populism

 By manipulating discord, legacy media platforms may feed an ‘industrial outrage complex’ using tabloid tactics to capture attention and boost ad performance while stoking national division. 

USA Today

Sport, as a media category, has long relied on perceptions of difference. “Sport is often fundamentally about geography, race, and community,” says Johnson. “When people get upset about sports, they're not really talking about sports usually. It's usually about questions of racial justice or gender justice, or deep geographic rivalries, like that between the public University of North Carolina and private Duke University’s basketball teams.” 

 Indeed, one Canadian study found that 82% of respondents believe that sport builds stronger communities, including by helping newcomers integrate and develop feelings of unity. 

Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport

 Nevertheless, these bonds are regularly expressed through opposition with a rival team.

Yet despite the inherent competitiveness in sport, the playing field and court are evolving into forums for collective action and unity. Not only have individual athletes taken stands for racial justice (Colin Kaepernick) and mental health (Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles) but entire teams, such as the US national women's soccer team, have spoken up to acknowledge the struggles of their broader communities. Audiences who see athletes as role models benefit from these displays of care, internalizing messages sent from the field or court. For instance, in the wake of 

 from playing tennis to manage her mental health, a wider conversation emerged about the pressure society puts on people to be productive even when unwell. This issue may be particularly pertinent to the 24% of workers in the US who do not have access to paid sick leave. 

Pew Research Center

“It's not just the individual athlete out for themselves but this broader movement toward social justice, equal pay, mental health awareness, maternity leave awareness, and work-life balance awareness,” says Johnson. “The sporting realm as communicated by the media seems to be the one shared space where that call to community action and awareness seems very prominent. I feel like the political realm has given that up in many ways, and sport always had a political voice but has, in some sense, become the more reliable civic hall.” 

 From Kaepernick’s protest against systemic racial and ethnic inequality to the activism of Carson Pickett (the first US women’s soccer player with a limb difference) to Jake Daniels, who became the first openly gay active professional footballer in the UK for more than 30 years, the field is a site of social change. 

World Economic Forum

Mainstream cable TV has, historically, beamed a cohesive, albeit flawed and biased, vision of the American identity directly into viewers' homes. This meant that, for decades, network television had an outsized role in defining social norms, including the American Dream – a market-oriented concept Johnson describes as a “calculus dream that, through individual effort, one can achieve one's goals.” 

 But network TV’s cultural dominance is receding. In 2021, streaming accounted for 51.5% of all original series in the US, up from 12.9% in 2016. 

Variety

 Evidently, Americans are looking beyond prime-time for contemporary models of the American Dream, connecting with this narrative through social media and algorithmically-informed streaming services. As such, today’s consumers may choose to construct their interpretation of the American Dream through episodes of 

, through the #girlboss or #thatgirl culture of social media, through the crusading of podcaster provocateurs like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, or Jordan Peterson, or via myriad other subcultures.

The American Dream always “conforms with the broader neoliberal ethic of being self-made,” says Johnson. Today, people are targeted with unprecedentedly specific media and advertising that doubles down on reinforcing filter bubbles and isolating audiences from wider perspectives, or as Johnson puts it, “while one can be globally connected, you're still just kind of in those boxes.” 

 This trend of specification suggests that the American Dream, always individualized, is only becoming more myopic – its vision of success more complex and consumerist. Rather than simply having a happy, healthy family, a mother gleaning information through social media may perceive the need to dress, feed, play with, discipline, and present her children back on social media in specific ways that require more of her time, energy, and money to parse. Or a man indoctrinated by his media feed of anti-science disinformation may refuse to cooperate with a national health mandate contrary to his individualist perspective on wellbeing.

In this way, highly specific media feeds may draw people into the pursuit of an increasingly individualized American Dream, despite self-optimization not being “an approach capable of solving collective problems.” 

International Politics and Society

 Politically effective collective power requires unification, and increasingly individualized media streams may distract from community goals. Many prestigious media brands, including 

, have published articles encouraging readers to break free from social media echo chambers and improve their media literacy and ability to parse fact from disinformation – a goal in the best interest of both readers and legacy media itself. 

Wired

The New York Times

Witnessing sports stars being penalized for their efforts to stand up for social justice can lead to anger among fans who see such protests as valid and justified. In 2019, the NFL partnered with Roc Nation to engage with social justice issues in the wake of criticism of its handling of Kaepernick’s kneeling protest. While this partnership led to positive outcomes, including the involvement of racially diverse artists and creators in the production of the Super Bowl, Johnson says the action follows an “incrementalist logic” wherein corporations make showy, PR-oriented changes rather than working towards accountability and dismantling discrimination within their ranks. 

 Launching meaningful initiatives such as the NFL’s 

, through which the organization has committed $250 million to social justice causes within ten years, is a more impactful way to support social justice. In fact, the NFL is on track to meet its total spending commitment by the end of 2022. 

Boardroom

Women's sport viewership has been rising, contributing to a reconciliation in the gendered polarization between male and female leagues, which frequently leaves the latter under-resourced and underestimated and adds to societal gender biases. In 2020, the Women’s National Basketball Association reported a 68% increase in viewership for the season, while the US National Women’s Soccer League saw a 500% jump in viewers. In 2021, a US Women’s College World Series three-game basketball championship between Oklahoma and Florida State averaged 1.84 million viewers on ESPN – up 15% from 2019. 

North Jersey

 Yet despite this interest in women's sports, media attention gravitates towards major men's leagues, and women's teams are still regularly denied the salaries, training facilities, and support of men's teams. 

 Some ventures, including media platforms Just Women's Sports and TOGETHXR, are working to make sports coverage more equitable, and traditional media brands could better cater to their audiences' interests by expanding women's sports coverage on their platforms.

Younger generations prefer following news via social media, podcasts, and the internet, with only 12% of Gen Zers and 16% of Yers reporting they watch network and cable TV news. 

 These cohorts are looking for ideologically honest media coverage of the issues they connect with, including abortion access, climate change, the economy, and workers' rights, often finding it from independent, progressive media sources like Status Coup News, Chapo Trap House, and Jacobin literary magazine. To appeal to younger generations and boost their credibility, mainstream media may diversify the roster of experts featured in debates and interviews to include more racially representative and socially democratic voices. They may also take inspiration from digital media's ability to engage audiences by integrating more commentary and questions from viewers into their programming (Gens Z and Y, after all, are used to participating in cultural discourse through online forums and comments sections).

Ahead of the 2020 election, 90% of both Democratic and Republican voters were worried that a victory by the other side would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the US

In 2022, more than 40% of Americans feel that civil war is likely to occur within a decade

Only 12% of Gen Zers and 16% of Yers report that they watch network and cable TV news

Prime-time TV has long highlighted the cultural differences contained within the US, though narrow representations have skewed the public’s perception of everyday life and views

Star athletes are challenging the adversarial narratives around sports media coverage, speaking up about specific issues to promote collective action and understanding

Individualized forms of media consumption have somewhat transformed the American Dream, with online echo chambers amplifying specific takes above others

Victoria Johnson’s research lies at the intersection of media, American identity, cultural geography, and sports. Her research focuses include critical history of US television and film, cultural studies, cultural geography, critical race theory, sports media industries, corporate branding and identity, marketing and brand identity, communication technology, and rural access. Her publications include 

, and multiple articles and chapters on the intersection of cultural geography, US television, and sports media.

United States

Citizenship

Media and Entertainment

TV, film, and social media video

Cultural and political divisions have come to define public life in the US, with many people conscious of and worried about increasing polarization. Canvas8 spoke to Victoria Johnson about how media consumption habits have fueled this shift and how film and TV may also bring Americans together.

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