Cultural criticism—like any form of guidance—can’t be heard when it’s entirely disconnected from the people it’s meant to reach.
Many cultural critics live in an unrepresentative internet bubble. Much of the current divergence between elite discourse and popular preference can be reduced to a simple heuristic: Most critics are on Twitter; most consumers are not. If you examine the coverage proclaiming the end of Harry Potter or Lin-Manuel Miranda, or castigating any other wildly successful cultural product or personality, you’ll quickly spot a pattern: The only evidence they tend to cite is an assortment of tweets.
Twitter is real life for the people who are on it, but most people are not on Twitter.
The problem with being a professional critic is that you end up consuming so much culture that you stop processing it like a normal person.
But when critics lose sight of why most people consume culture, they start missing what makes most things popular. In their search for significance, they forget about the fun.
Being a critic can lead you to lose sight of the experience of the audience.