I was talking to @galenkp a couple hours ago, as we often do on the weekend with Smallsteps, and we got onto the topic of what is on streaming services to watch. I was saying how so many of the shows are just the same thing over and over with different actors and backdrops, and he mentioned that he had watched a movie that was essentially a remake of Romancing the Stone from 1984, but wasn't actually a remake.
What I believe is happening is that there is just so much content out there now that it is not only difficult to create something even slightly unique, but also unnecessary. With so much content to choose from, it is possible to watch a lot and get the feeling that it is "new" even though it is all very much familiar. After all, they have different names and actors - they must be different.
It is not that there is nothing of quality out there, but there really isn't very much, which I think is driven by the way we consume through the streaming services too. They are able to have one or two okay shows and then, fill the rest with crap that no one really wants or needs to watch. Even though I don't even watch that much, I still find myself flicking through Netflix, Prime, HBO and Apple like I would have channel-surfed in the past, because there is nothing interesting to watch.
And that is perhaps one of the larger reasons too, where because there is so much choice, the value of all of it has been depreciated and there is nothing that anyone is really invested into for a long period of time. Regardless of what you actually think of the show, there isn't the "Friends" culture now, where people will religiously invest themselves into the show, the characters and their private lives for the decade whilst the show is going, and another two decades since.
It is all about quantity now, pushing out the next version of content, knowing that it has no logs, no longevity, and once people have consumed it once, it is going to get dropped on the content trash pile, never to be consumed again. It gets relegated to more filler to give an impression that there is choice, even though no one is actually going to watch it. It is like going into an ice cream store with a hundred choices, with Strawberry, Chocolate and caramel, spread amongst bean, chicken and dogshit flavors.
And then there is the other cultural change where people are watching short-form content from the likes of YouTube, of random crap pushed into a couple minutes, where there is the feedback "high from completion" every few minutes, to the point that people are no longer able to invest themselves into anything that is going to take up too much time. A two hour movie is a large investment, but 100 pieces of content spread across five hours seems the better deal. And, with the quality of the movies these days, that investment into watching a movie is limited at best.
The other aspect is that a lot of the social side of watching shows has been taken out of the watching, with less people in relationships and more spread across content, so there are fewer people to discuss a particular show with. Yes, there are plenty of online forums etcetera that produce content to read and watch, but it is largely a solo endeavor, not a personal conversation between two people who have a real-world relationship together.
Content consumption has largely become a process of social isolation, where the consumption happens from the comfort of the own home, but devoid of friends and even family. Rather than the stories that used to bring us together, they are vignettes broadcast to keep us apart, keep us disconnected from each other, but feeling like we are doing something of value with our time.
I have talked with many of my friends over the years about this and whilst many disagree as they sit down and watch with their partners, over those years, they are discovering that despite "watching together" they don't actually spend any time discussing what they have watched. It is like a ritual at the end of the day where they sit next to each other until the show finishes, brush their teeth and head to bed. It isn't a shared experience at all - it is not far different to two strangers sitting near each other in the cinema and then going their separate ways at the end of the movie.
I think that one of the challenges we face is that as a whole, we ourselves have become less creative as a society, relying on specialized others to do pretty much everything for us. Because we have become consumptive rather than creative, it is increasingly hard for us to actually analyze what we consume, because we don't have enough personal experience to do so. Yes, we are able to judge "good or bad" on how we feel about it, but even that is largely driven by what we are told to feel through the very act of consumption, where the various media primes us for the experience, nudging our opinion through the idea that "people like us" have also liked it.
People like us.
How do we know it is people "like us" if we spend so little time actually interacting with a range of people, like us, or otherwise? In the end, all we are doing is consuming what we have been suggested blindly, under the proviso that it has been "specially chosen" for us, without realizing that the algorithms are herding everyone into the same direction, because that makes it far easier and cheaper to produce the content that is going to be shoveled down our throats. Then, what we produce is based on what we have eaten, creating a circle of content creation, driven by the shovel, not the consumer.
But, since there is always something more created to distract us from actually thinking about what we are doing and why, we don't have to spend time thinking about this at all - we can just pack the void with more filler content - wishing for something meaningful to happen in our lives.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Sounds a lot like Web2 social media to me...
I really hope my stories aren't ever like that 😲
This post has been manually curated by the VYB curation project
It does sound like web2 :)
I think when people create stories that are actually part of their lives, it is far more likely to be engaging than those that are the accumulation of other people's stories they have consumed.
Definitely, and it doesn't hurt to have people talking about them in the comments either :)...
!PIZZA
You, absolutly right, Sir.
This is our shared anxiety as human beings. Freedom of action has been lost, and we are all under control to do something, not even able to say "no" to something we don't want. Like the new slavery system, "you have to be like us. If not, then you will still be like us." Unless we live in the mountains at the moment, they have control over what we consume.
Right now, we can only minimize it, right?
I think minimization is even a hard path, because there is so much pressure from FOMO, even on things that we wouldn't ordinarily care about - but because we are told to care about it...
We have been on this trajectory for decades and it is only accelerating.
A lot of stuff we do instantly today, used to be an event with family and friends.
We are now in the age of over abundance (some with lesser quality, race to the bottom, but better in areas with actual technological advancements).
Very soon we won’t even need a lot of jobs as we know today. We had the blue collar revolution (industrial), white collar (information), soon to be all done by AI and robotics.
Self fulfilling prophecy? Or by design? Is this inevitable? Is creatively “outside of the box” or just math where machines will optimize combinations and permutations?
Yes.
And yes, "abundance", but largely meaningless and useless items.
The AI is already leaving its mark, but it is far more subtle and insidious than most people seem to give it credit.
We are definitely in some form of the matrix - even if it is self-imposed.
AI up to this point still cannot replicate human brain. They are still good at designed purpose, up to a certain point. Human is still better at handling outliers.
The problem right now is the output from AI is good enough most of the time. Future content by AI will continue to be good enough most of the time in infinite abundance cheaply.
It could drown out human ingenuity especially when big tech continue to market and promote AI output and human creation don’t get the reach.
With our eyeballs glued to the screen accepting whatever is curated to us, imagine AI curates AI creations and that becomes what the masses focus on?
Exactly. It doesn't have to beat the best, it just has to beat the average. Most of us are average, right?
And they will do this because AI doesn't ask to be paid.
Yet.
Beast system. AI doesn’t need to be paid by fiat or anything. Data itself is a currency. Currency is a control mechanism as a constraint in an optimization equation.
The currency in an AI controlled world is your behaviour and follow what’s been asked of you. It is going to be like coupons on what and when and how much you can and cannot do.
It is definitely heading toward a black mirror episode, and all of the tech dystopias of the last 100 years combined.
Taking this another step further. Internet of Bodies and Neuralink (move forward to the future, say in a decade or two). That amount of data is only consumable by AI, 24/7!
Constrained by the algorithm and processor efficiency.
AI will know more about us than we will ever know about us. If and when AI is capable of making their own algorithm more efficient and through robotics connecting to the physical world.
SkyNet? Not too far out anymore.
And, it is going to impact on so many of our jobs too, where AI will be able to process what currently thousands of people within a company are doing. Two decades, and we are largely useless.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Depopulation_conspiracy_theory
From what we have just discussed, we won’t need so many people to work, to consume, we won’t even need money as we know it.
If AI reads this page and get ideas like this, and determined this is the thinking, we are doomed 🫣
At some point, we will switch off, right?
With "switch off" having several meanings.
When we have delivered our purpose.
I agree, that's one of the reasons I try to watch youtube or Twitch channels of ppl doing talking or showing things I am interested in. I also like using alternative film platforms as filmin.es (it is a Spanish one) which offer independent movies on top of the "regular" content.
I should checkout more independent film, as obviously the mainstream isn't doing it for me :)
I have no idea what's happening on media mostly amd because it all got a bit dull 👍
I mostly use it to nap to sometimes.
It seems that it all became too focused on the "bling".
The special effects became more important that character development and the story mostly.
The editing and cuts these days is also super fast!
And I think your observation about "shorts" may be on target. It's as though we've lost the ability to focus and concentrate for extended periods of time.
I wonder if this is the result of the amount of content we're bombarded with daily now? I suspect it is.
It has been over the last 3 decades this has happened and it has pervaded other aspects of our lives, like photography. It is all about resolution, not the story.
And, just think what this does in regards to investor mindset.
Oh boy...
I think it is beacuse a TV show, a series, a movie or a video clip used to be valueable till 2000s because we had to wait in front of TV to watch them and watch them again. Nowadays, we can access them anytime by our laptop or smartphone.
Yep - that is a big part of it. The advertising model is not like it used to be, which is why they are bringing it back to streaming over the last few years - unless you either pay more, or give up some rights.
Apple has a lot to do with it. The App Store almost buried traditional gaming - with well developed games with a story and mechanics.
In-App purchase facilitated gambling (gacha) and unlimited spending. When low effort software as a service makes more money than traditional “proper” games, it incentivized developers to shift focus and resources into areas that yield the highest profit (way cheaper to make, many don’t last longer than a few years, then rinse and repeat)
Subsequently it becomes subscription model. With subscription people demand justification for the monthly expense. Well, there you have to, constantly churning out content to earn the next subscription fee, while developing something new and unique is both risky and expensive.
To sum it up, it is the market force. Users want free and cheap, producers are profit seeking and they need to give what the users and the market demand. Free and cheap.
Thanks Apple.
Apple now want their pound of flesh from NFT sales too - 30% of the gas fee! :D
And yes, that subscription model is a big part of the issue here, though it begs the question, why do we keep subscribing? Well, most people realize that they have no money to actually do anything outside of the house, so this is a "cheap" way to still feel that we are doing something.
Economics reality.
I would laugh so hard when people subscribe to so many services and exceeded their former cable bill!
This is what Galen and I were talking about today - for me at least, I have never owned cable before, only free to air and an internet connection. Now...
That is so true.
I've never thought about it in that manner.. Truely... See when GoT was still a big thing I use to have a work buddy and we use to rant about that show... Even though we didn't watch it but fuck mate every week we use to recap the episode through talking about it... Its been years and well other than the Betty I've never really talked about a movie or a tv show quite like back then... Its like everyone is interested but not really 🤷♂️ everyone always stuck in their houses🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Lol - the Betty. I haven't heard that for a while.
And yeah that "stuck in the house" thing is interesting in my opinion - because I feel that people are getting comfortable being disconnected, without realizing they are actually craving intimacy and connection with others - things like, just shooting the shit recapping a shared show.
Thank God, I am spared the choice of serials. Now I'm sitting at a laptop, and my wife is flipping through the series and thinking which series to choose to watch. I always watch the shows she chooses :)
Ah - you make it easy on yourself - defer the choice and get brownie points.
Twitch is a streaming service that you do not mention - I suggest you give it a go, as it is free and is not only gamer-oriented, it has also 'real life talk' which can be kinda interesting if you give it a go :)
I have used it and find it rather pointless. I don't get why so many want to watch other people's real lives, while having nine themselves. Why not "get a life"? 😅
For “single” men, there is an attraction called bikini waifu hot tub live streaming. 🥵
That definitely sounds like something that brings a lot of value and meaning to a person's life. :D
When everything is an app away, and with generations of young people spending more time in front of screens, that is probably the closest to “getting any” nowadays 🤣
I heard that anime Monster is now on Netflix. If that is true I would definitely recommend that.
At least not in Finland - Finland has the worst range of streaming in the world.
I like to watch YouTube and give give honest review about the serial or movie. I think people's like to watch YouTube because search his favorite things like favorite movie and watch it. Web2 gives us amazing benefits and waiting for web3. I am big lover of games and web3 is special for gamers.
Let me offer an alternative point of view. It's not that we as people are less invested in shows and spend less time discussing them. It could be that you and your friends you speak to are in a particular age group that doesn't prioritise discussing shows anymore as you have millions of other more "adult" things to think about. I belong to this group for sure.
I do however agree with you that content nowadays is pretty low quality. There are some good shows/movies going around, but they aren't the same as the good ol' days. Maybe I am just old....
I am extremely selective about any of the TV I consume with my partner, but one of the things I make sure to do with her is discuss each episode before moving onto the next one. I love hearing what they thought about a scene or character development rather than just consuming media to stay busy.
I gifted $PIZZA slices here:
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Good one
This is the key factor why everyone in the society love just same type of thing because we don't make out time to be creative everyone wants already made and we can't design how good what we claim to like is, in most cases we don't even have a reason to like most things we like because we don't know the uniqueness in those products.
I really enjoyed reading your post.