Post
I've been thinking (and that's not good for anyone and everyone should be holding their breath) about media consumption patterns over time, and how those shifting patterns in consumer habits have shaped culture.
This might be an Old Man yells at clouds moment, but I think there's likely something to it.
I'll try to coalesce the things I'm thinking into coherent words.
@ajroach42 thank you, that is some powerful writing.
"I don't know how to be bored anymore"
I think you nailed it here. Constant stimulation seems the greatest risk, becoming addicted and being unable to cope without it. Right there is a weakness that gets exploited in many of us.
Time off gaining some perspective and learning to be bored again feels like a good idea. We should be teaching this to our kids!
For the last few hundred years, up until I was a teenager, media was slow, somewhat scarce, and largely linear.
When I was younger, I got VHS tapes (mostly linear, scarce) and books (mostly linear, scarce) and video games (sometimes nonlinear, even more scarce), radio (linear), broadcast/cable TV (linear), etc.
I might have 5 video games to choose between, and a handful of VHS tapes, and whatever books I hadn't read yet, and whatever was on TV, and that was it.
I had choices, but they were all fairly heavily constrained. I might rent a game or a movie but then I would set aside time specifically for it. I could check a book out from the library, where my choice of books was far less constrained, but once I made my choice (or two, or three) I was stuck with it for days or weeks until we went back.
There were a small number of pieces of media that I had constant access to, and all of those were tied to physical totems.
There were a larger number of pieces of media that I had occasional access to, via rental, which were also tied to physical totems.
And there was broadcast TV, which provided much more frequent access to something new, but on someone else's schedule.
When I was a teenager, we got our first taste of On Demand access.
I could download a plethora of games, movies, books, records, and whatever else I could fit on the meager hard drives I had at the time. (I was in a weird position of having lots and lots of sub 4GB disks and a USB IDE adapter in the early 00s, so it was a lot of media, but only a little at a time.)
When I had access to a fast network connection, I would spend my time digging through the C64 games database and downloading commodore disk images, which I would explore on my palm pilot when I didn't have an Internet connection. I spent hours with each game, because I only had a few with me most of the time, and there were occasional long stretches where I couldn't get more.
Or I'd download movies (I could fit two on a 4GB SD card) and watch those on my palm or my laptop.
And I kept a few books, not too many. Books didn't take up much space, but even then I understood the reality of choice paralysis.
At some point, I got a small laptop (eeepc 701) and downloaded the entire SNES library, and then I spent my time exploring that. (Exploring in this case meant playing most games for less than 10 minutes, before jumping to another title.)
I didn't realize it at the time, but something fundamental was shifting in the way I expected media to work.
I had more storage space (I'd add ~4GB a week in the form of flash drives or SD cards, then 8, then 16)
I stoped thinking of the things I downloaded like rentals, and started treating them more like purchases. (I'll want that for later! I should go ahead and download that, just in case.)
I got a 500GB external disk. It filled quickly. I got another.
A Terabyte of media!
And so much of it unexplored or underexplored.
But, even then, my access to fast networks was intermittent and "fast" was relative.
There were often stretches where I had no, or limited, connectivity. I was on dialup a few months out of the year into 2010! I was on 768k DSL at home until 2014.
It made sense for me to have a local collection. That local collection would be incomplete.
I still bought DVDs and blurays and VHS tapes and cassettes and CDs and LPs and game cartridges.
Our relatively slow network connection meant that I had incentive to fully explore my library. It grew at around 1.5x the rate we consumed it.
And then I had sufficiently fast Internet for streaming and access to streaming services (which didn't stop my library from growing, but did make my progress through it slower and more uneven.)
It happened slowly, but eventually I was spending as much time picking what to watch as I was watching. I was spending more time picking what to play than I was playing.
I was rarely fully invested in any given book or movie or show.
@ajroach42 "Acquire, Brock, acquire!"
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