  Variety shows  Bookmark and Share Monday, Jan 22, 2007  It’s
typical to see media critics discuss how we’ve “disintegrated”
into a niche society recently, from some peak cultural moment of
homogeneity twenty or thirty years in the past. Since it’s
become so cheap to publish and disseminate your own work, since
independent and DIY product now competes with industry-built
entertainment product, since the sector is now an on-demand
rather than an appointment-driven affair, since virtually every
entertainment product ever made (along with an ever-widening
pool of new material being made by the largest cohort of
cultural producers in history) is always available for
consumption at any given instant and so on, culture has lost the
overarching unity once provided by shared reference points—say,
Johnny Carson. What will we say to each other at the water
cooler if we are all lost in our own private maze of references?
(Chuck Klosterman had a column in Esquire a few years back
making this case.) We’ll be trapped in o