Comment by quacked
One thing I noticed while I was reading NASA engineer Allan MacDonald's book about the Challenger accident he tried and failed to prevent was that every time he came into contact with a member of the news media, there was a sense of skilled elitism about the practice of their craft. I started looking back on other nonfiction depictions of the times before the 1990s, and I was struck not only by the amount of elitism displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.
By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.
One of the things I remember about myself and others as young people emerging in the years around Y2K, was that we were taught presumption at every opportunity. Pat answers from the elite circles were to be found for everything, and the referential aspects of pop culture were built on that; they could critique it, make satire, but they couldn't imagine a world without it, and therefore the conversation had a gravity of the inevitable and inescapable. Piece by piece, that has been torn down in tandem with the monoculture. A lot of it has been subsequently called out as something toxic or an -ism or otherwise diminishing.
Every influencer now has this dance they do with intellectual statements where, unless they intentionally aim to create rhetorical bait, they don't make bold context-free claims. They hedge and address all sorts of preliminaries.
At the same time, the entry points to culture have shifted. There's a very sharp divide now, for example, between online posting of fine art, decorative art, commercial art, and "the online art community" - influencer-first artists, posting primarily digital character illustrations on social media. The first three are the legacy forms(and the decorative arts are probably the least impacted by any of this), but the last invokes a younger voice that is oblivious to history - they publish now and learn later, so their artistic conversation tends to be more immature, but comes with a sense of identity that mimicks the influencer space, generally. Are they making art or content? That's the part that seems to be the foundational struggle.