The Molloy-verse - The junk drawer for my interwebs

Killing the Past Doesn't Help the Future (or Why I'm Tired)

Why does every article I read lately feature the death of something or the end of another thing? We keep hearing that the past is dead. Murdered by progress.  Good riddance because we'll never need it again. The hipster hordes want to stamp out the imagery and completely remake the world in their image and ideal. Is this the insecurity of my generation coming to the forefront? Or is it a younger generation living entirely in the now and wanting to stamp out nostalgia?

 If it's the end of everything like newspapers, what will happen to those scenes in movies when the spy is sitting on a bench, passing time reading a newspaper. You know the one, the spy is waiting for his next meet up (maybe he never lowers the paper) or is using the newspaper to conceal his identity. If we kill the past, a newspaper might make the spy stand out as suspicious. It's interesting that in fiction, various technologies always look forced or dated. The iPad in someone's hands in a movie today might be this generation's version of the 70's porno mustache. Does our culture really need to move that fast and constantly be up to date?

Can we all agree to stop with the hipster aesthetic? I don't need everything to be the apex of design and functionality. It all makes me tired. Is the need to murder the past borne from the same hell that gave us jumpsuits, disco, and the pet rock? Is it the cousin of the Swatch watch and acid wash jeans?

It's accelerating. Maybe not in the way Douglas Coupland imagined, but things are getting faster and faster. On the one hand we're awash in information. It's delivered to us in both raw and curated forms: Information Democracy. On the other hand, the zombies haven't vanished. They're still here cycling through meaningless trends and the need to be first (at a much quicker pace). Instead of raising the discourse, the fad-hogs are just hungrier. The rest of us? We're just more tired. While we never worked to keep up, it's become more of an arduous task to fight it off.

So as I hear more often that I'm weird for not liking soccer or NASCAR, for continuing to read paper (instead of digital or nothing at all), for desiring open solutions to technology and information gathering (instead of choosing design or a fear of technology witchery), I'll just wish it would all slow down again. Just a little.

What do I want/believe in?
  • Not being available 24 hours a day
  • Apple is just another big tech company and is sometimes not the best option
  • Physical books and newspapers
  • Big companies should be regulated but individuals should be left alone to make (sometimes poor) decisions for themselves
  • Children should be kept out of bars but smoking should not
  • Baseball doesn't need replay but football does
  • The 1980s were the worst decade known to man and should never be celebrated
  • There is nothing wrong with a healthy does of cynicism
  • Everyone is too worried about being productive all the time

The Death of Commerce?

Everywhere you turn there are articles proclaiming the death of this or that. Print media, handwriting, fiction, the author, history, etc. These articles or pundits always declare that a new technology (most often the Internet) will be the answer. While this hasn't proven to be true among mass audiences, I'm beginning to wonder if there is a generational shift a foot. In terms of content (reading, watching, listening) it seems that new devices and apps are promising to revolutionize the world. While I think that's an exaggeration, there is something going on.

 There is a democratization of content that, I believe, is going to injure commerce in these areas. We've moved away from a handful of voices captivating us with their shows and messages (think Big 3 on TV and local radio) to consumers expressing a desire to curate their own content. What's interesting about this curation is that the generational shift is clear and easy to see. 

  • My parents (older boomers) use their TiVo to record shows like they did with a VCR. While they time shift, they're just pulling what they want out of the stream. Netflix (which they signed up for in the past year) offers them a wrinkle on the video store. Sirius is like cable for the car. Nothing too revolutionary. 

  • In my household (Gen X) we use TiVo to record shows and time shift. We're also using Netflix through our Internet enabled television and doing some streaming. I'll use Pandora on my phone to stream when I can't get to Sirius. In addition to convenience, our household is starting to cut out commercials. Increasingly, none of the services we use force us to watch commercials. 

  • Some of my co-workers (Millenials) are bypassing everything. They're maybe renting music through Rhapsody, but none of them watch television over the air, instead choosing to stream content from the internet. Additionally, they're bypassing printed media for online links (and avoiding the pay sites like the plague) and steering well clear of commercial radio. While they're paying for Netflix or Rhapsody, the old passive model of someone else programming content and offering with commercials is not part of their worldview. 

What's with the shift?  Is it technology, is it theft, is it something else?  I'd argue that a few factors are at play here. Let's start with technology. The younger you get on this spectrum, the more accustomed and comfortable the cohort is with technology. It's not frightening.  It's an enabling force in their lives. But technology alone wouldn't explain the desire to select and curate your own content. 

The desire to control content has grown among consumers as radio and television became all about corporate entities making money. Remember when networks showed quality (or at least entertaining) programming? Now the bottom line dictates what is put on the air (think reality shows, cheap and easy to control). Remember when local DJs selected music? Now corporate consultants program from a central location.  While these moves generated short-term profit they hurt the product. As a result, consumers looked to new technology to democratize their entertainment.

So where is this leading? I suspect that the old commerce models are going to die. That doesn't mean that consumers will never passively receive content from providers. I think the problem is that those providers are going to see large declines in revenue year after year. That means they'll squeeze more money out of the process, sending more people in search of the content they want the way they want it. I don't believe this will result in an explosion of self-produced television (music is another matter), but I do think that consumers will stop waiting for content to find them. 

The other thing it will do is chase consumers to premium services (HBO, Sirius, etc.). People will pay for what they want. The old models of content production and broadcast are likely on their way out. Twenty years ago we had three networks, Fox starting out, and a lot of bad cable channels showing Patrick Swayze movies all the time. Twenty years from now we're likely to have no network news, no locally generated radio, and viable decentralized publishing and music industries. The bad news is we'll lose convenience, the good news is that as we move away from big companies and profit we may actually get innovation again.