As more and more of our culture has moved online and become subject to the whims of algorithms in massive data centers, it often feels like we no longer recognize it. But we can still understand what our culture is and how it operates. Over the next three posts, I’ll be exploring the new architecture of cultural relevance: how Relevance has reorganized itself (Part 1), where Community has actually migrated (Part 2), and why the Monoculture isn’t dead—it’s just hiding in plain sight (Part 3).
Relevance.
Look at that word, sitting there. So innocent. It’s unaware of the chaos it has caused as everyone seeks to obtain it with no one really agreeing on what it is. Whatever it is, it is the path to “virality” and being at the top of everyone’s feeds, which is the most important thing, right? And yet when confronted with a highly relevant video or topic of discourse, we often don’t recognize its relevance.
In our prior broadcast era, relevance was a trickle-down process, flowing from cultural relevance to social relevance to personal relevance. With few choices and a small cadre of gatekeepers, media was aimed at the broadest audience possible, and, typically, the most measurably popular of those things fueled further media discourse, became the things that we talked about in our friend groups, and found their way into our personal libraries.
The internet has flipped this and we intuit the change without fully understanding it.
In our contemporary broadband era, relevance flows up, beginning with personal relevance, spreading to social relevance, culminating in cultural relevance. To understand this flow, we need to understand what these different types of relevance are.
Three Domains of Relevance
The types of relevance can be divided into three categories: personal, social, and cultural relevance.
Personal Relevance – Personal relevance is defined by the connection between an individual’s distinct interests and needs and the things that best meet those interests and needs. Personal relevance in content is content that validates or enriches the self.
Social Relevance – Social relevance is defined by the connection between an individual and their peers. Social relevance in content is content that facilitates and strengthens connections in communities.
Cultural Relevance – Cultural relevance is defined by its ubiquity. It transcends and connects communities creating a shared reality. Cultural relevance in content is content that is immediately recognizable and understood.
Two paths to cultural relevance
Consumers begin with content that fulfills a personal need, which may come from a corporate entity or a peer creator. Of that content, a subset gains social relevance as consumers share those things that matter with their family, friends, or affinity groups. Its social relevance grows as the groups continue to consume, share, and reference the content.
Just as identifying a relevance beyond personal interest is the path to social relevance, there is a path from social relevance to cultural relevance. Of those things that are shared among peer groups, there are some things whose social relevance is multifaceted, allowing that content to fit into different affinity groups for different reasons. Those things achieve cultural relevance.
That’s just one path, and for much of our early broadband era, that was the path to achieving cultural relevance. Today, however, algorithmically generated feeds have the ability to bypass social relevance. As recommendation systems attempt to identify potential audiences for a piece of content, it has the ability to push something hard enough to enough people that it can achieve ubiquity without social relevance. In fact, this dynamic underlies the cognitive dissonance in seeing that something is in the zeitgeist despite it feeling like something that no one you know personally has ever encountered, let alone liked.
Of these two paths, we can describe the former as a “rich” path. The content or topic of discourse has done the “work” required to reach cultural relevance. Because it has achieved a high volume of personal relevance and has been processed by people in their social groups, when it achieves cultural relevance, it has already been validated by social consensus. The latter path is a “weak” path. The machine has done the work for the topic and when it reaches scale, there is no social consensus validating the cultural relevance of the topic. Regardless, at its scale it has achieved ubiquity, and the lack of consensus around the topic may become the unifying topic of discourse for the content!
Understanding these levels of relevance and the paths through them is a strategic necessity. The question shouldn’t be ‘How do we achieve relevance?’ It should be ‘Which relevance are we chasing, and how do we get there?’ Expectations should shift too. It takes time to move through these layers of relevance, so people should plan accordingly. A willingness to take the rich path to cultural relevance will provide the opportunity to embed something deeply within our culture.
But achieving that social devotion requires knowing where to look. For decades, Social Relevance was anchored in physical proximity—the living room, the office, the neighborhood. Today, those anchors have lifted. The “Village” has migrated. In the next post, we will map this new geography of belonging and explore how the algorithm didn’t replace our communities—it unlocked them.
