Cultural tensions of 2026

• JANUARY 2026

Kicking off our Cultural Insights & Trends offer of 2026, we’re taking a temporary step away from the usual micro-trends focus of our Trends Snapshot. While micro-trends may often not have the longevity of a full year, we want to take a step back and look at some of the big cultural tensions that will define where our sectors head in 2026 and beyond. Cultural tensions are where conflicting and contrasting values, behaviours or shifts co-exist. They explain why two seemingly opposite trends can be observed at the same time. However, they often represent tradition and modernity, and as culture evolves, they come to define shifts in our industries. Here are a few of the tensions we see as impacting media and entertainment over the next year, and the evolutions to follow them.

Cultural tension: Legacy voices vs. challenger voices

Media viewing has been shifting towards the creator economy for several years. This marked cultural shift reached a tipping point in 2025, which became the first year user-generated material exceeded the ad revenue attracted by professional media produced by TV networks, cinemas and news companies, reflecting the direction in which audience eyeballs are shifting. But what typifies this tension from a cultural perspective is legacy media brands and platforms attempting to get a slice of these audiences by inviting these ‘challenger voices’ on to their own established formats, and finding mixed success as the conventional rules of play of legacy media are often left behind. There was the Women’s League Cup draw recently criticised after influencer GK Barry being accused of various unprofessional acts during her hosting of the draw. There were also criticisms of the behind-the-scenes production practices of Amazon Prime Video’s Beast Games, after years of questions about production on his own YouTube series. What this highlights is a legacy media desperate to bring challenger voices’ audiences to their platforms but trying to fit them within existing structures.

Trend to watch: Creator-native spaces

More legacy media will start to collaborate with challenger voices in their native environments, alleviating the pitfalls of trying to tame these creators, and often failing to drive their audiences towards an unfamiliar platform. The Bundesliga rights deal with Mark Goldbridge – which sees the rights holder broadcast 20 live Bundesliga matches on Goldbridge’s That’s Football YouTube channel this season – is a potential model we’ll see followed. The agreement takes coverage to where there is already a pre-built audience, giving them content on their terms, and allowing Goldbridge the creative freedom that has made him such a hit with youth-skewing audiences. If viewing figures prove a success, it will provide a roadmap for more challenger voices to argue that if legacy media wants their audiences, it needs to come to them.

Cultural tension: Rage vs. Joy

Recapping on the year just passed, several cultural moments sparked online discourse on a scale above the rest. Ask most people who spend much of their time on social media, and they might mention* the backlash to Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans advert, Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album, or even Bonnie Blue’s rise to infamy. What do these three events have in common? They are all, to varying degrees, manufactured to generate rage. In the years preceding 2025 (especially circa 2019-2023), the world was seemingly moving towards a more progressive, socially conscious consensus. However, by mid-2024, at MTM we were reporting on ‘The Great Unwokening’, typified in some parts by the rejection of liberalism and a return to more traditional beliefs and lifestyles. This was latterly dubbed the ‘boom boom’ vibe shift by Sean Monahan, an expression of maximalism and excess, seen through the villain aesthetic, male-coded values, and vice over virtue. The Guardian recently used ‘the great unwokening’ to describe the Sydney Sweeney-led movement of conservatism in Hollywood. But why did Dazed recently christen 2025 the ‘year of peak ragebait’? The creators behind these campaigns know they’re provocative and they will court controversy, but in a divided society, especially in online spaces, this optimises engagement. Rather than arguing that these issues shouldn’t be debated at all, they take up space where more purposeful or joyful culture once presided. (*with honorable mentions to the Coldplay ‘kiss cam’ scandal, and Katy Perry’s Blue Origin space flight)

Trend to watch: Joyful attention-seeking

While we don’t expect any immediate let-up of rage bait culture – Emerald Fennell’s imminent Wuthering Heights adaptation has been described as ‘aggressively provocative’, only fuelling further intrigue in the film – there is clearly still untapped space to generate talkability through more mysterious but ultimately joyful means. See Timothée Chalamet’s recent press tour for Marty Supreme, noted for its curious faux ‘leak’ video to launch the film, adoration of Susan Boyle, and mysterious associations with British rapper EsDeeKid. It’s still attention-grabbing, and reflects the challenge that cultural icons and their content have in trying to generate the talkability and hype needed to create commercial success. But while Chalamet’s tour has drawn its share of criticism, it does point towards an alternative model of cultural impact that is less rage-fuelled and more playful, less divisive, and more entertaining for audiences to engage with.

Cultural tension: Short-form vs. long-form

This isn’t a cultural tension in its truest form. After all, short-form and long-form content can happily co-exist for the most part without stealing each other’s lunch. However, competition is brewing in the form of micro-dramas. Their breakthrough in the US and other western markets finally looks like it is on the horizon following their boom in China and other Asian markets.

There have been false dawns around scripted short-form content before. The much-hyped Quibicrashed and burned in the early days of the pandemic, floored by the competition of other platforms like TikTok and YouTube, as well as the unfortunate timing of societal lockdowns that wiped out the ‘on-the-go’ use case that the founders had touted the app as being a solution for.

Trend to watch: Micro-dramas