Jay David Bolter’s The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media examines how a singular narrative of what constituted high art and “culture with a capital ‘C'” has fractured into a “constellation” of forms, with none that can claim a special place that is necessary for an informed citizen to keep up on.

He does say there is a multiplicity of different, often bubbled-off forms of consumerdom, none of which is a must for anyone but its fans. He allows this as quite all right for cultural products but diagnoses it as a problem in democratic politics. It’s difficult to answer the question of what a democratic republic is, except to address the issue of self-government in a variegated polis. But I digress.