I’ve just posted the first instalment, though I’m some way off a considered answer on ‘watercooler moments’:
http://adamlofting.com/192/on-the-blurry-definition-of-giving-up-television/

I self-select 90% of what I watch and read – whether through my curated list of people and organisations I follow on twitter, or through my selection of the Guardian and the BBC for my mainstream news.

Almost all of what I do watch on TV is off a hard disc, iPlayer or DVD. I am forced to sit through fewer than a dozen adverts per week.

This is the future of ‘convergence’ we imagined in the late 90s/early 00s, but what are the side effects the shift away from one-to-many broadcasting has had? Has the ‘filter bubble’ of only reading things that fit within our preconceived values and interests made us a more divided society – both in terms of the left/right split (cf. Occupy Movement versus Tea Party) but also in terms of demographics? When I wander outside of my own personal filter bubble, I hear comments and jokes that rely on an awareness of people and events, like Lady Gaga, X Factor, TOWIE and premiership football that I just don’t understand.

Now the population is hardly split along the old white collar/blue collar labour forces any longer, are we facing a society where the daily frames of reference that form watercooler moments are getting slimmer and rarer?

Maybe when people ask “how do you know what’s going on in the world?” what they really mean is “what are the social objects we share that we can talk about?”