The Super Bowl is a Big Deal for Democracy
The swashbuckling Buccaneers of Tampa Bay won the Super Bowl last night, behind their dreamy quarterback Tom Brady, who continues to lead a charmed life. General Motors also took the opportunity to alert the viewing public to their excellence in electric cars and CBS to their rebrand as Paramount+. The Weeknd was excellent.
But you may find yourself asking the question: why is the Super Bowl such a big deal? Didn’t the NFL peak in 2012 and enter a slow collapse due to an inability to manage social change and traumatic brain injuries? Why does anyone make commercials anymore? Shouldn’t the raw scope of our streaming services and technologies and surveillance make all this obsolete?
The Super Bowl is really important, perhaps more than ever. To understand why, and what this can tell us about the future of democracy, we need to start with post-modernism today.
Broken Fragments
Post-modern approaches to communication argued that society was broken into many small pieces, that there wasn’t a unified experience that tied people together or a singular flow of history moving toward some inexorable point, be that capitalism or communism. At first this might seem like an esoteric concern, after all, how often in daily life do you encounter a meta-narrative?
