Friendship streaming on demand
(with ads)
I’m just barely back from the Writers Guild xmas party which was nicer than you’d imagine from the sub zero weather it was encased in.
I had a couple beverages so you’ll forgive me if my typing slurrs. Is that how you spell that? Are there more Rs?
I guess I’m trying to work through a thought I had recently, wedged like a splinter in my skull.
It’s about how we engage with pretty much everything. I’ve touched on some of this before, about how most of the arts/entertainment we as a public found our way to before streaming was curated by any number of someones, and if you didn’t like what they had to offer, you could change the channel and try again. If you wanted to watch a show you had to be on your couch when it was on. You had to invest yourself, like sitting down for a concert.
Maybe you had a walkman, and one tape you’d play relentlessly until you knew every note and needed a break. You had to flip it, too, to get to the end. If you wanted to hear the same song twice, you had to wait til it rewound.
Media now is delivered via a tiny hadron collider in your pocket, extracting from the infinite every song and movie ever made. We’ve gone from sitting down out of a desire to engage with a specific work to a place where our every moment needs to be filled with something. They make speakers for your shower now, so you never have to spend one moment with your thoughts. If you’re on the couch, it’s less to watch your show and more to search to figure out what you should watch. Like boarding a plane just to find out where it might go.
A lot has been said about our communal attention spans and how they’ve been stretched to breaking until we can’t spend more than a minute focused on any one thing. TV writers are told now to make their dialogue simpler so people can follow shows without looking at the screen. Having forever 5G access to everyone and everything has maybe damaged our real interest in any of it. Movies and podcasts can be paused. Conversations are just another alert that you can try to fit in between all of that and some video office meeting where nobody’s listening and their cameras are off. A Kafka nightmare, a dark screen droning corporate jargon. Let’s table that for later. Let’s circle back.
All of our interactions are fleeting at best, we cancel our plans with friends the same day because why is friendship the only thing that can’t be paused til later? We’ll get around to it when we have more time.
I keep thinking about making a magazine. Something obnoxiously temporary, something you can only get when it comes out and is meant to be read and tossed in the corner or handed off to someone else. Something that isn’t more stuff to populate your house with. Whose only purpose is the time you spend with it. I dislike how much of the publishing market is about an investment in valuable paper. I want to be made happy or angry or sad by something that can only come from whoever made it. Not another option on your screen. Something you half remember and can’t really articulate why it kinda broke your heart.
In the meantime here are more pictures of Japan.
