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Comment by pharrington | Hacker News Reader

We're human beings. We're social animals. Popular culture is just as real as nature. Popular culture is a popular way to connect with other people. And for your example of Fox News, while that certainly is toxic to society, the salient element of that toxicity is not the popularity.

The article is about increasing hyper-specialization to the point of extreme isolation.

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Yes, we are social animals, but for much of our evolution we were social in much, much smaller groups... even smaller than these 'sub' cultures the article is talking about. Hunter-gatherer societies only had around 10-50 people in each group; we have evolved to be social in groups of this size.

The 'hyper-specialization' that you speak of might be a way to get our group size back to this original size that we have evolved to be comfortable in; the huge, un-natural, size of popular culture might be what we are reacting against.

The hyper-specialization we're talking about is specifically a way to avoid having a social group. While the hikikomori may not have exclusive interests, the whole point is to avoid physical contact with anyone at all. Maaaaybe I just can't see far enough into the future, but personally I think physical contact with other people is still pretty important.

Also partaking in popular culture doesn't mean pulling everyone alive that's interested in that culture into your social group.

Dunbar's number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number).

The average person can only maintain 150 relationships; how is popular culture (which is composed of thousands or even millions of people) closer to nature than isolationism?

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