Billions of years ago, we had the Big Bang. Today, we're living through the Big Blur. Politicians becoming celebrities, news turning into entertainment. With the explosion of media and technology, every area of public life seemed to go pop.

But now the trend seems to be moving in the other direction: It's not just pop culture influencing politics; it's politics influencing pop culture, giving rise to the latest product of our blurry age: partisan pop culture.

Reactions on online outposts to recent revelations about late-night host David Letterman's office affairs often were filtered through the prism of partisan politics. The same can be seen in comments about the latest developments in Roman Polanski's fugitive-from-justice scandal.

"I do think the country is more partisan, more divided, and that is having an effect on how we view things," said J. Parker of Dallas, one of many readers who responded to a dal lasnews.com blog post about Letterman's on-air confession of blackmail and secret sex. As did several others, Parker cast his reaction in partisan terms of Republican vs. Democrat.

"The backdrop for this was (Letterman's) open hostility to Bush, the whole Sarah Palin episode and, really, anything Republican. And then he and everyone on the left side being so self-righteous."

So goes the partisanizing of pop culture. And what may be going with it is its traditional role as society's playground — that dimension of public life disconnected from the substance and stress that's necessarily attached to everything else. While it has been embraced by academics as a fertile source of study and by entrepreneurs as a bountiful marketplace, the essential appeal of pop culture is that it's easy, breezy fun.

You might agree with the age-old warning not to talk about politics or religion at a party, but pop culture has always been the go-to gambit, the worry-free ice-breaker. A sigh of exhaustion over the Jon and Kate Gosselin saga countered by a rueful headshake for their eight kids, and a successful cocktail-party exchange is off and running.

But the way things are going, you may just find yourself announcing your political leanings by the way you exclaim over the latest episode of celebrity bad behavior.

"What's worrisome about this is the way it harshens culture," says Jeffrey McCall, communications professor at DePauw University in Indiana. "Ideology and partisanship bring stress and remove the opportunity to interact without that sense of pressure and noise. It shuts down interaction rather than facilitating it."

You can see partisan pop culture in the emergence of the Web site www.Conservapedia.com, launched as a conservative alternative to what its contributors perceive as the liberal bias of the popular Wikipedia.

An article on Conservapedia's home page warns of "the latest liberal propaganda" directed at children, the upcoming film "Astro Boy" — "the first animated blockbuster to discuss, if not necessarily endorse, explicit Marxist ideologies." The Web site garnered national attention recently when Comedy Central mock-pundit Stephen Colbert spotlighted what he characterized as trying to excise liberal bias from the Bible.

"It's funny to say, but pop culture is like the Bible in that people can always read it in a way that supports a particular cause or perspective," says Michael Peppard, a theologian with Fordham University in New York.

As it so often is, the media are the amplifiers turning up the volume on this pop culture trend. Simplifying complex ideas and situations, TV news outlets often frame stories in left-right political terms, as happened during the pope's visit to the United States last year.

"So when the pope used a lot of Spanish in one of his speeches," Peppard says, "all the commentators wondered if that was his way of endorsing pro-immigration reform or reaching out to illegal immigrants. They interpreted it as a political statement rather than, say, him speaking in the language spoken by many in the audience."

Whether you look back to media, or technology, or current events and the economy as the primary source of partisan pop culture, looking forward, it's easy to see this merging with another social trend also rooted in media and technology: the ongoing splintering of mass communities and experiences into an increasingly disconnected array of niches.

Just look at the Internet.

Like pop culture, the promise of the Internet was as a great crossroads where people from all over the human spectrum could meet and share and interact. But is what happened so quickly on the Internet — people dividing up and banding together with their like-minded fellows — now happening in pop culture?

For all our sakes, let's hope not.