Binge Culture is Killing Classics
Growing up, we all had a list of movies we considered bona fide classics, timeless pieces that would forever have a place on watchlists and stay-in movie nights. Every generation has its own little handful of classics, whether that be films like The Wizard of Oz for older groups, cult classics like Mean Girls for some, or childhood gems like The Lion King for others. Classics define a generation and influence society, which is why we should all be concerned about an emerging truth: the age of classics is dying.
Of course, you can’t really recognize what will eventually work its way into the collective consciousness of society at the moment. Even movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and Heathers were met with less-than-promising receptions upon their initial release. However, the problem here isn’t the media itself (or maybe it is. More on that later.); the issue is the culture that has rapidly developed in the past few years.
When defining what makes a classic, movie expert Ben Mankiewicz thinks of two things:
- “The movie has to have some emotional resonance that lasts beyond the immediate viewing of the movie.
- The movie has to have some sort of cinematic importance”
In recent years, there’s been a huge shift in the way media is consumed which has made it harder to find new releases that hit these two points. As a society, we’ve moved away from consuming long-form media and savoring long-awaited releases. The days of going to the movies and following a TV show with weekly released episodes are long gone. In their place is a new standard: binging and streaming.
What, you may ask, is the big deal? What’s so bad about Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBOMax, etc. taking over for movie screens and cable? If anything, isn’t it better to have increased access to entertainment media? The answer here is a solid “NO.” Sure, there’s increased access to media. However, the “big deal” here is a lot bigger than your average bitter Rotten Tomatoes score because of the rise of instant gratification via meaningless mass-produced media. The impact of this is two-fold and affects both sides of the entertainment coin.
“the rise of instant gratification via meaningless mass-produced media”
Over the past decade or two, there’s been a shift towards favoring short-form media over other forms of entertainment. This shift seems to have especially increased exponentially in the past five years, seen with the rapid rise of things like TikTok, Instagram reels, the Snapchat discover page, and other similarly-formatted platforms. For people, this means a new cultural attitude where having standards is often conflated with elitism. While “film bros” and “snobs” used to be defined by their unreasonable media critiques, the same labels now are used to refer to a broader population, including people who may rightfully disapprove of the rise of low-quality media.
As a group, humans have gone from watching an episode or two of TV a week to rapidly swiping through hundreds of videos a day, “liking”, commenting, and forgetting about them minutes later after moving on to the next new thing. This new form of media has contributed both to a shorter attention span and decreased patience, seen in the way people demand more music from artists the minute their album is released or rally for yet another season of their favorite TV show mere days after the finale of the last. The effect on our attention spans can be seen in the way many people admit to being unwilling to sit through videos longer than a minute and watching everything on 1.5x or even 2x speed.
With the amount of media consumed in such a short amount of time, the audience experiences a variation of information overload. This plays a huge part in the death of the classics, as the sheer amount of entertainment available makes it nearly impossible to be remembered and stick around in the public consciousness. Where movies and shows in past years were only competing with a handful of contenders, they now have to stand out in a crowd of thousands. Unfortunately, standing out isn’t even the hardest part; the hallmark of a classic is standing out and keeping its place in the spotlight, cementing itself in its popularity for years to come. That’s a hard thing to do with only one spotlight and countless front-runners on stage vying for the lead.
Our decreased attention spans and growing impatience have been met with enablement by media producers. Films, tv shows, music, and more are now released at a rapid-fire pace, leading to the burnout of many artists and creators. TV shows are released by the season rather than with periodic episodes, movie sequels premier as soon as a year after the first installment, and some musicians have turned to releasing new music every few months, churning out as much as they can to stay relevant. The media itself also experiences a type of burnout when it can’t keep up, with more and more TV shows being canceled before their time despite good ratings and promising reviews (one such example being Netflix’s The Get Down, canceled after only one season was made). Long-running television shows, once the behemoths of the entertainment industry, (think Friends or The Office) are no longer valued, with the plug being pulled on dozens of shows before their time. How can we have classics when half the time media is halted in its tracks before it even gets a chance to make an impact?
Long-running television shows, once the behemoths of the entertainment industry, are no longer valued
For the creators and the media itself, this means creative endeavors are overlooked and ignored in the name of releasing it quickly enough to get views. The audience's attention span, overstimulated and overloaded with so many options to entertain, is hard to keep without constant releases. The audience then moves on so quickly that the media doesn’t even get a chance to make more than a fleeting impression on society. Creators, knowing this, have started releasing movies and shows that feel like a cheap new phone: made to be used and unceremoniously discarded. Scheduled obsolescence has bled its way into Hollywood. We see this most clearly in recent blockbuster movies, which have slowly been moving towards a new flow of cadence, favoring spoiler-worthy plot twists and shockers over solid storylines. While they were once viewed for overall enjoyment and storytelling, films are becoming something you see once to “find out what happens” and unceremoniously discard later after they’re no longer trending on social media. Films are losing their longevity and becoming less rewatchable with every passing year.
Here, we can see French philosopher Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory at work. His theory basically says this: everything, both human and non-human, is an “actor” with a certain amount of agency and ability to act upon other actors within its network, influencing and shaping them while also being influenced and shaped by them. In this case, the increased availability of media led to an altered media consumption pattern. This, in turn, led to new media being manufactured to appeal to these new watch habits, contributing to the effect even more and feeding into a never-ending loop of decreased attention spans and dwindling media of value.
Think about it. How many movies and shows in the past few years have stayed in the public consciousness? Even things that made a huge bang faded away. No one cares about The Queen’s Gambit anymore. Even now, we can see the Squid Games craze die before our eyes.
Another issue is made apparent when looking at how streaming services can add to the problem. Filter bubbles and AI biases leak into what’s shown and recommended to viewers and virality is valued. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass describes one of the many reasons this could be an issue when they write “the training data to teach AI to recognize what counts as the “best choice” does not exist” (Gray & Suri, 2019). At the end of the day, all technology stems from humans who are essential to the development and improvement of technologies like AIs, even though “the human labor powering many mobile phone apps, websites, and artificial intelligence systems can be hard to see — in fact, it’s often intentionally hidden.” While the ghost work behind filtering and content moderation is, of course, vital and important, it also plays a part in what breaks through the public consciousness and gains popularity. Pre-existing biases work their way into algorithms and skew the favor towards privileged groups, with AIs often filtering and displaying media in racist, ableist, classist, and other prejudiced ways, reflecting and amplifying issues within our society. The selection of classics reflecting diversity is already a paltry one and not likely to be added to under these conditions.
The spread of media that’s able to get through the filter and AI bubbles can be compared to “the dissemination of prominent fake news stories… [where] false information on Twitter is typically retweeted by many more people, and far more rapidly, than true information… [and] by liking, sharing, and searching for information, social bots (automated accounts impersonating humans) can magnify the spread of fake news by orders of magnitude.” (Lazer 2018). The impact of bots is not to be overlooked, with recent estimates showing “between 9 and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots. Facebook estimated that as many as 60 million bots” (Lazer 2018). The more viral something becomes, the more attention it receives. While the fake news article focuses on political contexts, similar patterns and technologies apply here as well. Sensational and false information (which, in this case, can take the form of “spoilers,” cast reveals, or discussions surrounding the media’s storyline) is easily spread and the spread is then magnified by bots. This only adds to the unequal promotion of some pieces over others, often favoring privileged creators and actors at the expense of their marginalized peers.
This is what makes the new culture surrounding emerging media consumption patterns so sinister in that it adds to the marginalization of underprivileged demographics within those creative spheres, an issue that had been on its way to improving prior to the introduction of streaming services and short-form media. It’s a double-edged sword: while there are more diverse forms of media than ever before due to the ramped-up production and release schedules, it is harder than ever for them to break through and make their mark on audiences. Forget about becoming classics- it’s already hard enough to stay on TV screens for more than a week!
At the end of the day, it’s on all involved parties to make a change and preserve the artistic integrity of entertainment media. For the audience and viewers, practicing mindfulness and deliberative consumption can go a long way when it comes to making a conscious effort to appreciate and synthesize movies or television the way they deserve to be. For the creators, the focus is on maintaining a hold on artistic vision and valuing quality over quantity. However, one cannot maintain itself without the other. It’s on all of us to keep the classic from going the same way as the dinosaurs. But hey, on the bright side, at least we don’t need to stop an asteroid!
References
Cook, Meghan. “50 of the Most Popular Movies That People Originally Hated.” Insider, Insider, 30 July 2021, www.insider.com/popular-movies-that-were-originally-flops-2018-11#its-a-wonderful-life-only-became-a-holiday-favorite-when-it-entered-public-domain-2.
Desta, Yohana. “Canceling the Get down Proves Netflix Is Getting More Cutthroat.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 25 May 2017, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/netflix-the-get-down-canceled.
Gray, Mary, and Siddharth Suri. GHOST WORK How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. 2019.
Hare, Breeanna. “What Makes a Film a Classic? It’s Complicated.” CNN, 5 July 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/07/05/entertainment/movies-what-makes-a-classic/index.html.
Hern, Alex. “TikTok ‘Tried to Filter out Videos from Ugly, Poor or Disabled Users.’” The Guardian, The Guardian, 17 Mar. 2020, www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tried-to-filter-out-videos-from-ugly-poor-or-disabled-users.
Heilweil, Rebecca. “How TikTok’s Recommendation Algorithm Works.” Vox, Vox, 25 Feb. 2020, www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/25/21152585/tiktok-recommendations-profile-look-alike.
Latour, Bruno. “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications, plus More than a Few Complications.” Philosophical Literary Journal Logos, vol. 27, no. 1, 2017, pp. 173–197, 10.22394/0869–5377–2017–1–173–197.
Lazer, David M. J., et al. “The Science of Fake News.” Science, vol. 359, no. 6380, 9 Mar. 2018, pp. 1094–1096, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aao2998, 10.1126/science.aao2998.
Mulligan, Mark. “From Binging to Burnout: The Creator Economy’s Fault Line.” Music Industry Blog, Music Industry Blog, 8 Feb. 2022, musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/08/from-binging-to-burnout-the-creator-economys-fault-line/.
