Intent and Control
What can the rise of Netflix tell us about how we approach the world?
Small programming note: This is weekly post number 10!
Thanks to those who hopped on initially and have stuck with me as we’ve explored some out there subjects. As I said from the beginning, a big part of my work here is self-focused: I want to get better at writing content like this, and there’s no better way than just doing it 😉. Thanks for being part of this experiment, and I hope I’ve challenged you to think of the world in a different way or two.
If you have enjoyed what you’ve read so far, maybe consider sharing?
Alright, now back to our regularly scheduled content.
Last week, we started to explore what modern-day “High Times” might look like by looking at the impact of streaming services on how we consume television-like content. We talked about how the immersive nature of TV, combined with the flood of content enabled by streaming services, lets us fully immerse ourselves in the meta-narrative these shows are giving off. This leads to the notion that, regardless of our intent, as we “binge” consume these types of media, we are, in fact, grounding ourselves in their stories.
This brings us to an interesting point. When Netflix first started streaming TV shows, did they intend to change the way we consume these types of media? As we discussed last week, while “marathons” of TV shows were out there on cable and broadcast television, they were the exception, not the rule.
No one was wringing rerun value out of those shows, and Netflix’s format was perfect for it. With Netflix, you could watch two or three episodes at once, on-demand, and then pick up where you left off in the narrative the next time. People loved watching shows that way, and it lead to the cultural force we now call “binge-watching.”1
These days, it’s easy to forget that Netflix was DVDs by mail in the early early days. Then it was streaming movies…then it was streaming TV shows.
In 2012, Sarandos began to argue internally that to stand apart from the crowd, and to avoid being at the networks’ mercy, Netflix needed exclusive content that it fully controlled. “If we were going to start having to fend for ourselves in content,” Sarandos says, “we had better start exercising that muscle now.” In short, Netflix needed to begin buying its own shows.2
So notice, the intent was not to change the way companies made episodic television-like shows, but that was a byproduct. I think our friend Marshall McLuhan said it best:
When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.3
When faced with uncertainty, we look to what feels certain and use that to interpret the future. So what McLuhan is getting at here is a big thought for us today:
At any given moment, we are typically unaware of what our new technological changes at present are going to mean for us eventually.
Netflix intended to reinvent our relationship with motion pictures and TV-like content. They saw a market gap and went to fill it, and created a whole new way for us to engage with content. What I don’t think they likely considered were the further ring-out implications of what they were doing.
As we talked about last week, streaming these TV shows in a binge fashion has a different effect on us than if we are merely engaging with these pieces of content on an episode-a-week basis. A further point to recognize:
The initial circumstances of a change are almost meaningless as an indicator of the long-term ramifications of a change.
What is the long-term effect of COVID-19 on our world? What’s the long-term effect of a year of Zoom-dominated interaction on how we think about work? What’s the long-term effect of our current cultural conversations around race and politics on the Western World's future?
It’s hard to predict.
This is a truth that we can approach in a few different ways.
We can deny it and become absorbed in whatever mindset we want to have and continually reframe the world's happenings in our desired worldview.
We can embrace it and recognize that we humans have a fundamental desire to feel like we are in control. We must then work to manage that desire to control and leverage the flexibility we gain by being in touch with reality.
As is maybe obvious from my phrasing, I am a fan of the latter. And this circles us back to our leading question: What are we grounding ourselves in.
I think a lot of how we feel about those approaches is informed by what we are grounded in. If we are consumed with content that talks with great certainty about the future and what will happen, we will inevitably buck when faced with something beyond our control. Instead, we can embrace a mindset of growth and change, recognizing that what we are grounding ourselves in really does make a difference.
See you next week as we continue to dig into more changes brought by our electric media age.
The Medium is the Massage, 74-75