Media Exhaustion

When I was in middle school and high school, so much of my identity depended upon what I surrounded myself with, including, and most importantly, my friends. I remember early days when I listened to “dangerous” music, filthy, corrupting, loud, and sacrilegious, a habit I adopted from various friends with a collection of industrial, punk, and alternative music. I watched anime because my friends watched anime; played Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying games because my friends did. To a teenager, who affectively lives their life mimicry, identity does not exist.

As I aged, I found my own footing, preserving on to some of the tastes that I developed as a teen, but also developing new ones, reflective of truer identity. Regardless, times were different in the nineties. Mobile phones were a relatively new phenomenon and certainly not the media devices they are today. Television shows had to be watched on a actual television, as well as media events. Information was controlled.  Reality television barely had a platform except on the more scandalous parts of the day, when children were at school, and lesser known networks needed programming to get their viewers to the content shown during primetime. Content was driven by loosely by executives who determined the success of programming based on viewer shares.

In the nineties, expression, for lack of a better term, was controlled.

I should say controlled because, but for limited examples, most television programming had a purpose to which the content geared, a purpose other than for the pure expression itself. Sure, there were offensive television shows which pressed boundaries. For example, televisions shows like the Simpsons and Married with Children raised the ire of many who found the content juvenile. But even those television shows were controlled, well-written and with a message.

But this was before Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, before Youtube, which exploded after the millennium. The passing of the millennium brought us new platforms for media giving the masses a cheap and easy way to find a platform to put out media without restraint, without guidance, and without control. Viewers has new, unlimited content to watch. But the criteria changed. Viewership did not depend on quality of writing, because very little of the new media had been vetted through a creative process. Rather, people watched because the new media was audaciously ugly, showing the worst of human kind, a sort 24-hour America’s Funniest Home Videos except unfiltered and cruder. People watched because it was the next best thing to being present at a car crash with none of the guilt.

The result: media outlets lowered there standards by creating car crash television, or reality television. People enjoyed the situations of “real” people being damaged in the every day life of things. The Osborns, the Kardashians, the Real Housewives, all of them were to represent life veritas. And yet, none of those shows represented any of us, not our problems, not our lives, nothing about how we lived, only the way we might have wanted to live.

Fast forward to today. Finally, the news cycle has been invaded by the specter of the uncontrolled. Now, our political officials and other persons in places of power and respect feel that it is important to tweet and post on any number of media platforms the most private and personal of themselves, as if the media platform itself were a part of their own consciousness. It is uncontrolled ugliness often with no purpose and no guidance other than to expose themselves. 

I realize the irony of posting on the internet a complaint about the uncontrolled nature of expression the internet has released upon the world. I freely admit I have a Facebook account, and a Twitter account, and a Instagram account. And yes, it is hypocritical of me to point all of this out. I just want you to understand that I am exhausted, and, despite fear of sounding like an old man, I miss the old days when things were much quieter and little more boring and little more about matters of substance and not about cute dogs and animals performing on home videos or presidents making ugly statements or instigating other countries.