What better way to inaugurate a new column than by making a broad, subjective claim about the largest shift in popular culture over the past ten years? This shift partially involves cultural artifacts so almost completely rendered obsolete that we may soon reach a point where a new generation of boob-tubers doubt they ever existed. Like any obsolete media that barely possesses even marginal kitsch or nostalgia factor (I’m looking at you 8-tracks), we’ll soon wonder why we ever put up with them. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m speaking of the television repeat.

Yes, Virginia, there was a time when television networks would basically go into hibernation and re-roll an entire season of shows in the same viewing order while we patiently waited for the new season to begin. There was a time when the summer months were a television wasteland of all the stuff you’d already seen (sure you could instead, like, go outside, but that’s a different story). There was a time when you hailed the coming of the TV Guide Fall Preview Special because it had been five painful months without any new shows. There was a time before shows like "Lost" would experiment with different running schedules to promise no repeats and minimal interruption to the weekly installments. Yes, there was a time when television networks actually controlled our consumption patterns the way the seasons controlled the sacrificial rites of the Aztecs, and I’m doubtful that anybody misses it.

Now the convenient part of the almost dead repeat-season was the ability to catch episodes or even entire shows that you may have missed. If you lacked VCR programming skills (or didn’t own one) and if the question of "Mr. Belvedere" or "Head of the Class" caused your family some inner turmoil, then repeat-season would eventually bring everything back to harmony. But what need is there for the repeat in a world of Tivo, DVR, Bit Torrrent, and in a world where even the networks themselves offer episodes on their websites the next day? Why wait for a repeat season when you can actually purchase the entire season on DVD a few months after it’s over (a curious case of paying for the right to endlessly repeat something . . . but, at least, on your own terms). There isn’t a whole lot of reason for the repeat anymore, and over the past few years the networks have grown wise to this fact. Sure, the Fall season still tends to be the launch time for most new shows. However, new shows are being launched year round now, especially in the summer; and I could be wrong, but I think VH1 launches a new Celebreality show every day.

But the death of the repeat is not the huge, cultural shift in entertainment I mentioned at the start of this column. It’s merely one of the most noticeable symptoms. What’s really changed is the entire temporality of popular culture itself. The results obviously go far beyond the death of anything like a traditional, television season. When I worked at a Blockbuster Video over thirteen years ago, it often took an amazingly long time before a movie left the theaters, waited off of the cultural radar, and finally made its way to home video. Now the wait is often a handful of months and even quicker if the movie performed badly. There are even raging debates within the industry about simultaneous DVD and theater releases that could possibly become the nail-in-the-coffin of the sticky footed, cell phone cacophonous, social experiment in bad manners that we call the theater going experience.

Or take the now ubiquitous "spoiler alert" that you’ll find on any website dealing with current pop culture (well, any website with an ethical respect for other people’s viewing experiences). The idea of a spoiler alert fifteen years ago would have been ridiculous. Sure, chatty friends may have spoiled the plot of a movie– maybe you waited too long and general consensus ruled it fair game to discuss plots and reactions in general conversation (or your friends just happened to be asses). But in a pre-internet age, and an age of less options to watch pop culture on your own terms, the odds were that if you really cared about a show or movie you’d have likely seized the opportunity when it arose. Now the pop culture fan lives under the potential threat of the spoiler, of not being up-to-date enough. Websites and blogs respond to (practically gave birth to) this sped up condition and drop plot bombs like they’re on an all-out mission to destroy surprise (not to imply there isn’t a spoiler culture out there that also actively seeks them out). And these spoilers are not always hidden, not always easily avoided. A few months ago when Captain America died in his own comic book (oops . . . spoiler alert), the front page of Yahoo announced the death bright and early on a Wednesday morning . . . hours before even hardcore comic fans were anywhere close to picking up their weekly stashes.

The new, often unspoken rule behind pop culture’s altered temporality is: if you want to participate more actively, that’s fine, but you better do it fast. That supercool Soprano’s finale parody you made? Would have been cooler if you got it on Youtube about three weeks earlier before a hundred other people did. Missed last season’s finale of "Lost" but planned to catch it soon? Maybe you should have taken a few days off from the internet. We’re all at a peculiar point. We have more options than ever to slow down and make popular culture fit into our lives, our schedules, and out tastes; but simultaneously, staying up-to-date and participating within it has never felt more like an uphill battle.

This column will have one, exploratory mission– to seek out the intersections of new media and popular culture and look at how they’re affecting one another. Pop culture has never been easily definable, always representative of a semiotic battleground based on the values of who ever was doing the defining. Cookie cutter fodder divvied out to the masses to keep them passively in-line? One big advertisement for culture as a product and consumption as a lifestyle? Harmless entertainment multiple steps removed from the "higher" or more weighty offerings of culture? Hell, if we’ve never been able to pin down a definition yet, what hope is there with new media actively reshaping the definition and possibilities before our very eyes?

I see pop culture not as mere entertainment, not something we escape to as a release from "real" life, rather as an integrated and crucial part of our social, lived experiences. I see at as a space where we can make sense of ourselves, discover the pleasures that make us tick, and organize parts of our social interactions. This is not a new role for pop culture itself. What has changed are the possibilities to interact with and be a part of pop culture offered by new media innovations. What has changed is the ways we can talk about, review, and make meaning of it all with each other. I argue that we were never the passive, easily manipulated zombies of the Frankfurt school or other cultural critics of gloom and doom, but we never had so many opportunities to prove that to each other. To this end, future columns will look at celebrity fan websites, television review boards (ala TWOP), Second Life avatars and worlds based on pop culture, the portrayal of new media in popular shows, and much more.