I am going to begin to describe various institutions, phenomena, and events, which have accelerated in recent decades for various different reasons.
We have long seen at times, in civilization, tendencies to cross fields of endeavor, so to speak.
It has happened in the arts, in sciences and arts, in politics, for centuries, and millennia, really.
Ideas in one field are adopted, modified, imitated, for other media, another social context, other political or commercial or representational purposes, whatever.
What is new, it seems to me, is the accelerating tendency both to integrate new, and also to disintegrate older, in the process, social and personal experiences, histories, products, interrelationships, ideologies and even physical environments of life, really, based primarily and initially on market capitalistic initiatives.
It represents an unprecedented conjunction of private product commercial marketing and development, ubiquitous government deregulation, public and private social and commercial networking innovations, entertainment initiatives and innovations feeding on these tendencies and on the private media's technical and transnational transformations, and on the resulting willingness of all to promote and purvey anything which is saleable in the media and product marketplace, regardless of quality content or social conscience or consequences.
Now there are whole groups of people who identify with, say, The American Girl, or with the Twilight Series world. And with other converged marketing vehicles, amalgams of motion pictures, products, books, and games, household interiors and apparel, designer houses, even, etc.
In my generation, back 4 decades ago, one perhaps saw the beginnings of it, as Obst points out in passing, with the Star Trek series, and trekkies.
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