When it came to media or music, it used to be that you had to wait. A lot. Nowadays, you don't hafta so much. There is still a bit of waiting for your content to load, or for the ads on the video to play out beforehand, but that is nothing compared to the way it was before.
TV used to be a long, drawn out affair. Popular shows came on at certain times and so you planned your free time around the shows you wanted to watch, these shows usually coming on during the evening. 'Prime time TV', that used to be called. The Sunday newspaper came out with the TV listings for the upcoming week, but if you didn't get the Sunday paper the daily carried the TV programming for that day. An archaic magazine called 'TV Guide' was for sale at the end of every supermarket belt in the land, so you could pull a copy out of the magazine rack and lay it on the belt at the same time you were loading your groceries.
Music came on the radio and you just had to wait for your song, that hot new one that you really liked, to get played. After that you had to endure barrages of advertising between songs and lots of mediocre songs before the DJ would decide to play it again. There was no such thing as having control over the music. All you knew was that your song was in the station's rotation. Radio was like that. It was just the way it was.
Movies played in the movie theatres, but if they were old enough and good enough they would be run on TV and so you keyed on that in the TV listings. Sure, the movies ran with loads of commercials. You couldn't escape those, but getting to see that movie you liked again was worth it, wasn't it?
"Nope", said The People, "it wasn't". They wanted choice- and boy did they ever get it.
It’s 3:00 a.m.!
Victoria Heath- Unsplash.com
Choice built on choice until we have what we have today. First there was cable TV in the TV world, followed by premium cable channels that you had to subscribe to, followed by a groundbreaking phenomenon called VCRs. ‘Video Cassette Recorders’. Suddenly, all those movies you had to wait for you could rent out at a place called a Video Store. People flocked to these places and perused their aisles of offerings. You could see them there heavy in the early evenings and it was a competitive arena 'cuz after they had picked up dinner at the nearby grocery in the shopping center, they would pop in the video store to get a movie for the evening. Hopefully, the store had something they wanted to see, or there was new stuff. Nothing was worse, over time at these places, than wandering the aisles looking for entertainment. You'd come in to find the new stuff had all been rented out and what was left was stuff that you had seen already, which would cause you to give up after a wasted twenty minutes and walk out empty handed (which happened to me more than a few times).
In music, choice was offered in the guise of more music being packed onto a platform with greater capacity or the music was made more portable. Believe it or not, cars did not come equipped with stereo systems back in the day. They came with AM radio installed and that was it! FM radio came out in the early 70's and changed all that, suddenly you could install (and they sold these everywhere) car stereos that you could mount under the dash which would play AM and FM radio, as well as eight track tapes, or somewhat later, cassette tapes. Tapes meant that your music was portable! I drove around for years with a briefcase full of cassette tapes I had recorded. Seems utterly ridiculous now but at the time I thought it was pretty cool.
CD's came out next and you could pack even more music on those, and the sound quality was better, so of course cassettes were dropped in favor of CD's. Cars by that time came with built-in car stereos, first with the cassette players built in, then with cassette and CD players built in. More speakers were added by manufacturers, and the stereos carried more base, midrange, and treble settings, plus the units had the ability to scan channels, and that was good- but it still wasn't good enough.
Satellite TV and satellite radio arrived at about the same time. Satellite TV duked it out with the cable providers for dominance and then.......
Videotaped movies started getting put on slim, lightweight new platforms called DVD's and then a new company called Netflix started mailing these DVD movies to people which meant that they could get on their newfangled computers and simply order online which was the death knell for the once mighty video stores.
I Pods got birthed soon after and now suddenly people could store thousands of songs on tiny little handheld devices. CD's suddenly seemed cumbersome and quaint and the writing was on the wall with those too.
Cable and satellite TV providers kept adding more and more channels until it got downright ridiculous. Some packages offered hundreds of channels but even that amount of entertainment wasn't enough. People wanted still more.
Technology said “We'll give that to you!” and so 'streaming' became available. Awkward and glitchy at first, it picked up speed as the nascent networks were able to provide more bandwidth and suddenly you could forgo waiting for your Netflix DVD to arrive in the mail and simply click Start to watch a movie on your computer and then on top of that social media arrived and You Tube as well and suddenly programming other than cable or satellite TV became available. Ordinary people started to upload content which could be watched anywhere at any time and that's why I sit and stare at the search block of letters to choose from and wonder where to go next on You Tube because I just watched Elvis' 1956 Ed Sullivan performance and some videos of cool industrial machines and sang some Karaoke. Over on the Roku streaming stick are so many other choices that I there too discover that I am able to quickly exhaust any immediate, in-my-head list and am tasked to make a list ahead of time, really put some thought into it.
We certainly have come a long way, haven't we? From no choice to too much choice. Spotify. OMG! The amount of music on there will easily take me the rest of my life to listen to, and already there's way too much TV to watch in one lifetime. Where are we going with this?
We used to have lives outside of entertainment but those seem to have been discarded in favor of satisfying an unquenchable thirst for more music, cooking shows, concert footage, you frickin' name it. It's too much, and it's happened so fast. I really don't know what to think about it. I have to push back from the screen and the speakers and in silence think about it. Have to have some personal thoughts again. Gain some space, some distance, from the onslaught.
Maybe it's like obesity. Given the choice, a lot of people will eat too much food and then somewhere down the line, when the fat they've accrued can't be denied anymore, diet time has to be endured. Is it the same with content? I don't know. I don't think the human mind has a capacity limit so it's up to the individual how much content they want to pack in. We as a race have never experienced this amount of data intake before. What are the ramifications? So far we seem to be doing alright.
I have no desire to go back to the old days but you really have to wonder what is coming next. Probably some method of continuously interfacing with all of our devices will be offered up. Will we hear its siren song and be helplessly compelled to follow?
Haven't seen too many people saying no to anything up to this point yet, myself included!