The death of shared experience
A couple of weeks ago, my mother gave my 7-year-old daughter a biography of Lucille Ball (kind of random, but she was into it). It led to a discussion of “I Love Lucy” and its centrality to the daily lives of millions of Americans during the show’s heyday in the 1950’s. We showed her YouTube clips of the chocolate factory episode, and of Lucy hawking Vitameatavegamin, and my Mom reminisced about how she and her family — and everyone she knew with access to a TV — would look forward to each new episode and talk about it at school the next day.
To my daughter, raised in the silky cocoon of on-demand media — Apple TV, cartoons that can be paused while you go to the bathroom or recorded for later consumption — this notion of anticipation seemed rather quaint. “You mean, you just had to wait until it came on?”
I added my own recollections of counting the days each December until the airing of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (so what if we were Jewish — it was a thrill nonetheless). At 7pm Central/8pm Eastern on the anointed evening, we lay on the shag carpet in my parents’ bedroom to watch the Peanuts, sponsored by Dolly Madison snack cakes, as they took on the creeping commercialism of the holiday season. I didn’t know what ‘commercialism’ was, but that didn’t detract in any way from the joy I took each year in its defeat, lovingly delivered by Linus’ blue blanket. We couldn’t DVR it, we didn’t own it on Blu-ray or download it from the Apple Store. It was the evening that marked the real arrival of the holiday season each year, and we shared those magical minutes with kids across the country, or at least in the Central time zone.
Those synchronized media experiences are becoming fewer and fewer. We save up our favorite shows and binge watch them according to our appetites and schedules. There are a zillion channels and choices, and even within most households, people aren’t consuming the same event/show/story/music at the same time. We take in our content in parallel, process it separately, and report on it to people who probably didn’t experience it themselves. Events like the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards are recorded, paused, fast-forwarded — so that even the ‘live’ audience views them in a staggered way, muting the collective gasp of amazement at the last-second touchdown or the shocking acceptance speech. We can’t even rehash them freely around the water cooler for risk of being the ‘spoiler’ for somebody who plans to watch it after he finishes Season 2 of ‘Homeland.’
In a marked shift from Lucy’s day, we are a society wary of putting our faith in institutions. There is no common, trusted source for news. We filter and customize our information flow into a current that carries our canoes along at a comfortable, individualized pace. “Extra, extra! Read all about it!” is now sounded on our iPhones through push notifications that we control, and which we probably ignore until enough people around us deem the information important enough to share on social media.
Imagine the moon landing in today’s media environment: “Wait — don’t tell me what happened. I’m recording it.” Or the 9/11 attacks, where instead of being transfixed in shared shock and pain by the coverage on CNN, we take it in through separate blogs and newsfeeds, or Kardashian tweets: “OMG, NYC :-( :-( :-(!!! Xo”.
While the breadth of channels and formats certainly provides greater access to real-time information, it also lessens the experience, the heightened emotion of knowing that millions of people are taking that moment in alongside you, without a cacophony of instant analysis to drown out the feeling.
Is the President’s State of the Union address boring? Typically, yes. And is it annoying that it preempts other shows? Only if you actually watch network television, which you probably don’t. But there is definitely something to the idea that we watch it together, in its labored entirety, so that when we tear it apart and rehash and disagree over it the next day, we are starting from the same experience, rather than cherry picking from someone else’s [inherently biased] selections.
There is unquestionable value in having a range of outlets and voices to inform us about what’s happening in the world. It’s not like I want to live in a society where I have to get my information from one channel at prescribed times — especially since I live in Louisiana and it would probably be Fox News. But all the choice and autonomy does come at the expense of a sense of community and authenticity, sharing comfort in difficult times, or adrenaline in victory. It also clouds our ability to take in significant events with our own eyes, ears and hearts, in their complete context, without a chorus of commenters weighing into shape our opinions before we’ve even had a chance to form them.
My kids may never experience my particular brand of Charlie Brown Christmas anticipatory fervor or dish about their favorite Lucy-like show the next morning at school. But I do hope that they will know the joy of watching an American athlete triumph — in real time — at the Olympics, or have the appetite to digest primary source coverage of an important news event. And most importantly, I hope they won’t be doing it alone.
