#105 - Culture Freeze

I’ve been feeling like a big/main reason that a lot of people feel like they Missed The Memo on modern culture is that a lot of traditional media has failed to incorporate massive shifts for fear of being seen as "outdated" by the time of reflection.

One of the best parts of Bo Burnham's Inside is the Unpaid Intern song mentioning unpaid workers who go back to their dorm and torrent porn. It was the first time I had ever really heard torrenting pop up as like A Thing despite having been around and relevant for years!

I get why pirating content is probably taken out of any script by execs, but also every friend group I know has an IT person with two hard drives of discographies & movies who downloads everything for everyone! And media should reflect reality!!

There was a break along the way.

What they wanted us to consume and talk about vs. the real world we live in that we are forced to consume (and don’t really want to talk about).

(Like yes, there are documentaries about climate change, but there are no casual characters in hyper-watched sitcoms or reality shows who make it Their Thing to constantly remind the cast/audience of the specific actions we can all be collectively taking—not in a short showers way, in a “this is what energy policy discussions among friends can look like” way. Bare minimum I would like someone to demonstrate what it looks like to care.)

We’re the most media-trained people who have ever lived. We understand and have intimate knowledge of how this sausage is made. Imagine telling someone in 2001 about PR relationships. There was, of course, blind item websites and people on the fringes certainly were aware of what was once the best-kept secret in Hollywood, but we were consuming US Weekly covers pretty uncritically until like 2016. There was a ~reveal~ in the finale of The Hills that it “wasn’t real” and that caused major backlash at the time.

Imagine now watching a show that stilted and having the majority of the audience be completely bought into the idea that Kristen Cavallari and Brody Jenner are actually soulmates 4ever. I just don’t think it could happen anymore we have too many forums of analysis around media!

And it's how I feel about video game discourse, and any time there's a fictional social media influencer on a show, or the understanding of why a clip or nickname would actually go viral. We're not seeing ourselves or our lives in most of the shit we're watching!

When we do, it’s niche, we have to seek it out, and it probably becomes a coded language that we share with an online fandom. Yeah, maybe we can eventually convince our friends to watch it, but there are just so many places to consume and so many people with massive followings that it’s impossible I’ll know all of them—even if millions of other people do!

This chart? YouTube. Barely relevant in the overall discourse of splintered content and fractured fandoms. The reason TikTok creates such insular followings is that it’s extremely likely your FYP page looks nothing like your best friends. This is no longer a shared bonding experience IRL because we’re constantly driving an individualistic consumptive model forward.

And culture remains stuck, maybe because there’s such an overwhelming amount of change that happened so quickly.

(But I do think that the horror genre has to figure out how to write around the fact that phones create a plot inconvenience. The suspense of disbelief relies on rationality and if every single plot has to write around the existence of phones, it’s going to take fans out of it.)

There are just natural evolutions of discussions that should have happened by now. Video games have been a major life fixture for so long how are we still pretending that they’re something that are only sought out by teenage boys? Where’s the storyline of a 40-something woman who is hiding her credit card bill because she’s ashamed of how much money she spent on Candy Crush lives the month before?? Why is Love Is Blind playing quirky music when Kwame brings up his PlayStation and saying that it’s a major fixture within several of his friendships because they play together all the time. That makes sense!! That actually reflects a lot of discussions that I think couples should have.

Any time there's a fictional social media influencer on a show, it’s bad. Even when the movie starred a TikToker, the She’s All That remake still didn’t accurately capture any element of what would actually cause someone to get canceled, or demonstrate any understanding of why a clip or nickname would actually go viral. Or how someone would gain success in that space. Or how follower count would cause social interactions within a high school friendship to change. Even just some talk of the pressure to have every photo be liked by all your friends and how teenagers now have literal popularity metrics they can use to compare themselves to others (or have those statistics be used to bully them!).

We're not seeing ourselves or our lives in most of the shit we're watching! So there is no casual updating of language, or episodes that tackle “issues” because we’re simply revolted at the idea of sincerity as people now.

It’s “cringe”.

Caring? Cringe.

Heartfelt narratives? Cringe.

Honest friendship & demonstrations of healing? Cringe.

I don’t know when the last time a children’s movie came out that was considered completely earnest. Yes, Watership Down and Charlotte’s Web left an ~impact—but they also took children and the lessons they were imparting about life & grief seriously. There were no added jokes for the parents to enjoy. Their audience was kids and they took that seriously. The intent was to help them understand themselves and their feelings.

Post-Shrek, everything winks at the audience all the time. And sure the kids like the comedy, but how early is too early for the predominant emotion of movies to be an encouraged ironic detachment from the material?

Art reflects life and we have the opportunity to capture and produce so many different aspects of what humanity is going through as we continue our journey on this earth. And art is important, and we have more of it than ever. Yes, some of it is produced to be ignored or “put on in the background” but that’s more of an indictment of the marketing companies that have thoroughly saturated our lives.

The reason that “upsetting” discussions are being barred is because we might turn off the program before they’re able to hawk us a pharmaceutical or new Buick. (I recently got Peacock with ads and really sincerely need to ask: has literally anyone ever been influenced by a car commercial to go out and purchase a new vehicle off-the-lot? Or at least like in the last 10 years? Idk, feels fake!)

Everything is now produced to keep our eyeballs watching as they splice in as many subtle advertisements as possible.

Even shows like 30 Rock did it, and they did the ironic fun comedy thing of pointing it out as they were doing it, as if that somehow made it Not An Ad.

And it works! It’s kind of genius. I quote Cerie saying, “I only date guys who drink Diet Snapple.” far more than I would any other actual ad/plug they could have included.

As we become increasingly individualistic, it does make me concerned about the alternate versions of reality we all occupy. It’s easiest to identify on the political scale with people who hold opposite opinions to me, but I often think it’s most shocking when I diverge from someone with who I generally agree on most topics.

Part of that is the pace of information. It’s so easy to miss a major update or read an article that radically shifts your thinking that no one else around you has read. We’re all creating realities out of disparate truths (while attempting to dodge all the unchecked lies). I don’t think that’s ever been more possible. We don’t even let people claim ignorance anymore, we’ve made Not Knowing into an intentionally diabolical act!

So much has happened, so quickly.

The hesitation to move forward is the lack of comprehension that we have about how rapidly it’s all shifted. But as more and more people use media as their sole connective thread to those around them, it concerns me that they’re not even able to consume things that lead to critical discussions of events impacting them in their daily lives.

But also, we’re missing out on silly little jokes that we could be making about things like torrenting porn! Accidentally super-liking someone on Tinder! Older couples going to dispensaries to pick up weed and running into friends they didn’t know smoked!

I just think that it’s a major missing element in today’s world, and maybe it’s actually reflective of the fact that with so much choice comes disparate realities. And maybe that’s on purpose because we feel foreign to each other—even those who we share spaces with—and that makes it harder for us to coalesce and demand better treatment as a unit, as a community.

I guess I just feel like if religion is no longer the opioid of the masses the question becomes: what replaced it?

I don’t think I’m going to love what the answer implies because but once again it’s being left it up to us as individuals to change one-by-one rather than expecting better from the systems that produce the content in the first place!

But then again, they’re beholden to their shareholders.

Worship hasn’t gone away.

We’ve just changed what it’s centered around.

And it might be harder to produce narratives that feel reflective of a world that won’t stop progressing, but I just think it’s fucking weird that it’s been three years since the pandemic started and we’re still writing around it!! No one seems to have cracked the code and it’s increasingly a-historic to ignore world-rattling events!

So.

Do better, legacy media!

From the archive:

Last year - #46 - Fire Island Is Like...So Good

Two years ago - #7 - My 'Get Your Life Together' Plan