But why pay for a book when you're entertaining yourself with streaming music and zombie shows? It is killing culture; just not the culture you care about.
Bet really, why pay for a book when people are choosing streaming music and zombie shows as their preferred medium of culture? If anything, that's an illustration of how culture in total is growing, even if it's killing parts of the culture that you care about.
This growth allows me to connect to distant people who share my culture and identity, instead to my physical neighbor with conflicting values.
It opens up cultural niches that aren't viable in smaller communities or weren't viable before - something that won't have a critical mass to grow or even exist in a city of 100,000 people can have a thriving culture worldwide nowadays.
Yes, we're losing the notion of a shared monolithic identity kept together by mass media keeping "everyone" (or 3-4 major groups/demographics each) in a nation on the same page culturally. While it does mean that the society is becoming less united, this is increasing diversity and bringing the culture towards the individual differences in taste; I believe that in the end this trend is a good thing, both for the individual people and culture at large.
I don't think you're acknowledging the other side of the trade off: if you aren't interested in something popular, you're going to be effectively alone in spite of a torrent of options for interacting with others. Reducing popular culture to sub groups makes this much, much easier to encounter.
My friends call this "Facebook fatigue": looking at hundreds of friends and feeling alienated because of few shared interests.
Regardless, claiming that culture is "dead" or "thriving" seems to be missing from evidence.
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