I’ve been watching episodes of Showtime’s Californication recently. It’s so good that it actually makes me sad, not because its plotline is tragic, but rather because so many people I know are gleefully (if inadvertently) celebrating the death of this kind of creativity, and if they get their way, relentlessly clever entertainment simply won’t exist anymore.
Showtime, HBO and their ilk anticipated much of what would change about the way TV content was consumed, positioning themselves to benefit from the fragmentation of the captive network channel audience across more specialized, subscription-based cable channels. This trend enabled a series of smart, witty and foul-mouthed shows to stick it to the mouth-breathing creationists AND generate serious revenue, what they call in the business a win-win.
But today’s fragmentation is based on aggregating millions of viewers across an endless pool of short-form, user-generated content, the only possible outcome of which is an equally endless pool of unmitigated garbage. I’m not talking about Gossip Girl, and other contrived attempts to convince teenagers that the people running TV networks understand the Internet — in any case, Gossip Girl is now tanking in the ratings, succeeded only where the economics didn’t work, and is only perceived as the future by those without a clue. Instead I’m referring to the share of attention that YouTube, et al have claimed, and which is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg.
The trouble with making great video content, regardless of where or how it’s distributed, is that it’s expensive and requires the active participation of intelligent, educated and trained individuals. For all the talk for at least the last 50 years of the dumbing down of popular culture as rendered on TV screens and in movie theatres, and the replacement of artistic principles with the imperative to make money, the formats themselves were always some assurance of quality. Quite simply, it’s inherently more difficult to entertain for 30 minutes, let alone 90, than it is to do so for five. And beyond issues of format, creating barriers to distribution generally improves the quality of content, no matter how much the champions of democracy over meritocracy might argue otherwise.
A recent article in the Economist pours scorn on the opinions of those who bemoan the dwindling literacy and attention span of high school graduates. It does so with some fairly typical journalistic trickery: diminishing the importance of a trend simply because it’s been happening for years. As the Economist’s argument goes, we shouldn’t worry too much about shorter attention spans, because the nostalgia we feel is for an age in which attention spans had already been shortened. Because, for example, the Macintosh OS undermined the importance of words by replacing the command line interface, we shouldn’t be too concerned that teenagers read less each year than those of their age did the year before. It’s progress, don’t you know.
As for those teenagers, apparently they are “skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.” And their lack of basic literacy is being replaced by an ability to think on their feet. But I think the reality is simply that we are, in general, valuing education and intelligence less, and, not to put too fine a point on it, getting dumber and coming up with excuses to justify the glorification of ignorance. If all of this sounds like elitism, it really isn’t, or at least not if you make a distinction between elitism and meritocracy. Call me old fashioned, but in most cases I think the crowd has no wisdom and ought to be treated accordingly.
So, back to Californication, I suppose I’m struggling to understand why I’d want to exchange good content for bad, simply because of a clever argument about progress. It’s no coincidence that Californication’s protaganist, Hank Moody, is suspicious of the direction in which the creative industries are heading (he’s a writer), and in one episode he even launches into an on-air tirade against LOL and other celebrations of illiteracy that comprise a good deal of online communication. In other words his values are becoming an anachronism, a state of affairs which causes him pain. I know how he feels.
Post a Comment