With Netflix being much in the news of late, I’ve been thinking about the impact that streaming has had on all of us since its inception. Despite some wonderful series and great memes regarding the ‘streaming wars’, I would argue that Netflix and it’s ilk have been a net negative to society at large.
My argument is based on two main points.
- Loss of Community
- Quantity over Quality Content
Netflix has essentially killed the office water cooler.
I remember High School-era Monday mornings very vividly, even now. As we were walking into school, or shoving our wet jackets into our locker, we were looking around for our peers to ask the only pertinent question at the moment-
“Did you watch The Simpsons last night”?
What followed was a debate about how funny that episode was, favorite quotes which we all attempted to mimic and discussions about why Phil Hartman was the best. Regardless of where people’s opinions lied, it was always a good conversation. A way to chat with people you didn’t usually talk to, a balm for the fact that we were back into school and something to look forward to on the weekend.
As I got older, that experience was replicated over and over with shows like Alias, Lost, Friends, the OC and whatever teen slop we were lucky enough to get from The CW at the time.
We got one episode a week, 22-32 times a year and that was plenty. We sat there when the thing aired, or DVRed it when the technology caught up. For the most part, we all watched it around the same time.
It was a wonderful shared experience that didn’t reward how much you watched, but rather how you watched it. What did you get, what did you miss, were you paying enough attention? When you watched a show, you watched the shite out of that show.
Streaming robbed us of that, not only by the sheer volume of what it put out, but by the schedules it adhered to.
You didn’t have to wait anymore, you could binge an entire series. Then move onto the next. We weren’t watching together anymore, we were all watching our shows alone at our own speed.
Sure, there are some great communities online where you can still do that, it’s not what it was.
When I tell you that the finale of Friends had more hype and excitement on it than the Superbowl, you have to take my word on it.
We refer to shows as content now, and we don’t watch, we consume.
In my house, I essentially forced my kids to watch the last season of Stranger Things with me, and we did one episode a night. We made it special, we had popcorn; when the episode ended, we sat there talking about it. And when we finished these first 4 episodes of the season, we started counting down to when the new episodes come out.
It’s something fun for us to look forward to, and I can’t tell you how much I missed that, on a grander scale.
There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. The fact that now there’s a show out there; no matter how wild your interests are, just for you, means people are still going to flock to what they know.
Unfortunately, it means they’re most likely to do it alone.
But for me, I’m going to take my time with shows, and hopefully find some more folks out there who still do the same; and maybe, just maybe-
You can meet me by my locker on a Monday morning and ask me if I watched the Simpsons from last night.
-sohmer
