In the rising tide of pop culture I am not waving but drowning

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/08/pop-culture-kim-kardashian

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Should The Imitation Game have won a Bafta? I don’t know. The question alone is enough to send me into a spiral of anxiety. Was Katie Price a worthy Celebrity Big Brother winner? Pass. And no, I don’t have an opinion on Madonna’s Snapchat-released tunes.

The truth is, I haven’t seen or heard any of these things, just as I haven’t consumed most of last year’s social media memes, anything on Instagram and most of this year’s exciting new books or plays. I may grin and nod when you mention them, but chances are they have passed me by.

Of course, it would be easy to shrug and say not keeping up with the Kardashians is part of growing up. Maybe I’m just too old. So much pop culture is youth culture, and it’s easy to let The Hunger Games or Zoella pass you by with a cynical shrug. Yet some people manage it: I recently found out my great aunt is on Snapchat. Worse, last week she posted a funny parody of a music video on her Facebook page before I’d even heard of the singer in question.

Besides, if you are going to pretend you are above mass entertainment, you need something else to show for it. And it’s not as though I’ve kicked a Celebrity Big Brother habit for evenings in with the great Russian novels. This was brought home to me at a family party last week. I could only faintly mouth, “Oh yes, I read that – that was good,” while my aunt raved about the Rubens exhibition and Dara, the first original Pakistani production to be adapted by the National Theatre.

I think I am suffering from a mild form of chronophobia: fear that time is moving so fast I’ll never be able to catch up. When it comes to the tide of culture, I am not waving but drowning. And I can pinpoint the moment this started: 18 months ago, when my daughter was born. Suddenly my free time was slashed, and more often than not I chose to spend it staring into space contemplating my exhaustion. All the same, I never expected that, having dropped out, tuning in again would be so hard.

In my defence, it seems clear that pop culture now moves more quickly than ever before. No sooner has there been a Twitterstorm than there is a backlash; if you blinked and missed the original story, none of it makes sense. I still don’t really understand who Alex from Target is, or why a baked Alaska caused such a meltdown on The Great British Bake Off.

Our cultural life is also more fragmented. TV shows now come from all around the world. Comic-book geeks and cutting-edge music aficionados crowd my Twitter timeline with their Mastermind-style knowledge. I can’t keep up. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You, claims pop culture is becoming more complex and intellectually demanding than ever before. (I’d tell you more, but I haven’t got round to finishing his book).

For those of us desperately trying to #stayrelevant, there are apps that tell us exactly which cultural events we are missing. The old fear that others have a better social life than I do has turned into anxiety that everyone is more up to date than me. Am I the only one who feels like the high court judge who had to have the Beatles explained to him?

It’s tempting to just give up. I wonder whether this is behind the current trend for “digital detoxes”. Is switching off your electronic devices a way of ensuring you don’t lose face if flummoxed by talk of Michelle Obama’s Saudi style choices, or Harry Styles’s latest squeeze: a new version of smugly proclaiming you don’t own a TV?

For me, the best reason not to throw in the towel is that pop culture mirrors our society’s values and assumptions just as much as art does, and it’s very timeliness is why it matters. Losing track of it feels like retreating from the bigger conversation about what we think is important, and why. Which is why I will struggle in the face of my chronophobia, and finally find out why everyone tells me I’d Better Call Saul.