The Media Appetite
The similarities between how we consume media and food
We have a word for watching a bunch of episodes of a T.V. show at the same time: the binge.
Of course, this term is borrowed from the act of eating an enormous amount of food. It’s become a staple of media culture made possible by the advent of media streaming. Before Netflix, bingeing an entire season of a show in a day took considerable effort; nowadays, it takes more effort to turn the T.V. off than to let auto-play lure you into just one more episode. Bingeing has gone from being somewhat of a fringe approach of consumption to being the default, with some shows even having this style of consumption built into their very narratives.
That being said, binge eating is a terrible way to get nutrition, not to mention dangerous for one’s health. Most things are best taken in moderation, and media is no exception.
A Media Surplus
The onset of obesity largely correlates with societies where there is an abundance of food. Until relatively recently, in many cultures, being overweight indicated that a person had unrestricted access to food, and was therefore presumably wealthy; in societies where this is still the case, beauty standards are adjusted accordingly. Similarly, in the case of a rapidly expanding media culture that aggressively shoehorns itself into every new medium that appears, could a wide abundance of media be bloating some of its consumers, not physically but perceptually? In an age where a person schedules their YouTube regimen as meticulously as a meal plan, could we be becoming reliant on media for too much, increasing our tolerance for it in the process?
A steady stream of media consumption (and by extension an increased tolerance or space for it) isn’t a new cultural phenomenon. It’s a status symbol, and an ancient one at that. Regular trips to the opera and symphony (or their equivalents) have long been synonymous with luxury, affluence, and, most importantly, free time, and not just in western cultures. If there’s one thing that characterizes an aristocracy, it’s its ability to spend time pursuing more whimsical or intellectual endeavors without working one’s hands to the bone in a sawmill.
To watch a lot of T.V. necessitates the free time to watch a lot of T.V., and this indication of your relative luxury is best demonstrated by effusing about the T.V. you watch. Most people don’t have this somewhat ulterior intention in mind when they ramble about their favorite shows, but in effect, it’s exactly what they’re accomplishing. $7.99 a month for Netflix isn’t prohibitive for most of us, but it’s one of the costs of seeming and feeling culturally literate. After all, what better way to draw a potential romantic partner for a “chill” session than by sharing in a novel cultural experience with them?
And for those with enough time to really consume it all, to ravenously binge every episode of every show that comes under their radar, is it going too far to say that, physical health issues aside, there might be a risk of becoming over-saturated? Perhaps it could signal the onset of a certain morbid mediality, where media ceases to be a leisurely activity and starts to become an obsession, one that taints perceptions of reality to the point where reality ceases to be captivating enough and becomes just another crappy T.V. show to switch away from.
Take Community’s Abed for example: a caricature of an avid T.V. and movie geek who’s out of touch with reality, but also a cautionary tale for people with too much free access to media, sacrificing an attenuation to things like social cues or the institutional expectations of adulthood in the process.
The parable of Abed might not even be that extreme. In the 2015 documentary The Wolfpack, we follow the Angulo brothers, a group of teenage brothers who were hardly ever allowed to leave their Manhattan apartment growing up, using their vast library of movies and T.V. shows as their primary lens into the reality of the outside world. While seemingly content with many elements of their lives, there’s still something identifiably tragic about their story. Their cinematic expectations of real life, and the ways in which those expectations aren’t met, contributes to the sense that theirs was an abusive upbringing, even if it was (mostly) nonviolent. Theirs was a forced media diet, resulting in a certain awkwardness moving through the world once they managed to escape the confines of their father’s authoritarian rule. It reminds us that too much of anything can be bad for us.
Picking From The Menu
This fear of media’s negative effects makes intuitive sense to me primarily because of how we normally talk about media. We discuss it as if it’s food, sometimes making our mouths water and sometimes downright disgusting us. Consuming a lot of bad media doesn’t leave you hungry for something good. It just makes you disappointed and, most importantly, full. We have a reason to be choosy about what we watch or listen to: some of it sucks, and we don’t need it in our bodies.
I’m not the first to treat media this way. Intuitively, the metaphor makes sense: we often feel as though we hunger for content, stories, and experiences; a hunger that media satiates. Like with food, some of us have a healthier relationship with media consumption than others; some even take pride in their practiced avoidance of it. These people speak with an air of pretentiousness on how well they maintain a healthy media diet, bragging about how they’ve never even heard of Nicki Minaj, let alone listened to her music.
These people operate under a few assumptions: that in avoiding some media, they’ve kept their minds clean of bad, less “nutritional” media; that their palates are too refined to stomach certain content; and that there’s an ideal for media consumption that cultivates a healthy mind, the way certain foods cultivate a healthy body. Some people defend what others might consider unexciting T.V. shows (your Mad Mens, your Houses of Cards) as somehow having a more profound effect on them as viewers, not unlike those who prefer less processed, and thereby less flavorful, food — call it free-range vegan T.V. Some people even admit to having “bad taste,” like any one subjective experience of liking or disliking something is more valid than another — as though listening only to Top 40 songs is as embarrassing as subsisting primarily on Taco Bell and Coca Cola.
And a rigorous screening process is necessitated by the fact that media is exhausting. It’s filling. We have a finite space in which we can only store so much of it at a time. At some point, we hit a refractory period during which we need to consume something passively, if at all. Some have more space for it than others, but most of us eventually reach a point where we feel the need to get out and do something in the “real world.” This craving for a non-media experience isn’t dissimilar to the feeling one gets when they’ve had too much to eat — a drive towards a non-eating experience, the nausea that comes with merely seeing the source of one’s discomfort.
I’ve been noticing this dynamic more frequently as people bombard me with recommendations for shows I haven’t started, or ones I’ve abandoned that have “gotten good again.” My answer, more often than not, is something along the lines of, “I’ll have to check that out eventually, but I don’t really want to start any new shows right now.” I’m overstuffed by the media already on my plate, to the point where I feel fit to burst.
I’m a voracious consumer of art in all its forms, and at this stage in my life, I truly believe that any example of it that I consume enriches my life experience in some way, both the shit and the works of genius. One cannot be an effective curator of their media without knowing how to identify quality, and I think I’m getting there without overloading myself. On the whole, I watch things because I want to watch them, not out of some debilitating addiction but out of a curiosity and appreciation for the craft of storytelling.
But from time to time, I do have to pause and wonder if I’m snacking because I’m hungry, or because I just want something to chew on.
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