[oneng]

Along this line of thinking that "society is being forced into being average", I would reference this piece from Epsilon Theory:

https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-elton-hootie-line/

TL;DR: In order to be "heard" or to achieve enough of a following to be economically/politically relevant, you must "dynamically range compress" everything to sound the same and appeal to the largest audience, which removes diversity.

[Nasrudith]

That sounds like why old broadcast media is so frothing mad at the new - they have to try to please large bodies with lowest common denominator models to try to get the "average" to max yield.

New media can engage in discovery and targetting to a homunculus generated from the individual based upon their models and what they think about them. The model may be a twisted imaginary construct but it is a better fit than the also imaginary "average" human used to target. Now the old media did have their own demographics ranges but they dealt with it backwards and more proxies - asking are people 20-40 interested in foo instead of "is individual person X probably interested in foo?".