At a random gathering I attended last night, someone mentioned Criterion’s 24/7 channel, which I was aware of but had completely forgotten about.
I turned it on this morning and—as is the entire idea of the channel—a random movie was playing. The stream does not say what the movie is, how long it has been going, or how much time is left. There is no way to start over from the beginning or even to go backward or forward. You just watch whatever is currently playing.
After about ten minutes of watching, I figured out that the movie was Wim Wenders’ Until the End Of the World. I really like all of the Wenders films I have seen but while I had started watching this one a while back, I have never watched it all the way through. That is not because I didn’t like it but rather because it is just very long.
So I watched it for a bit this morning until the rest of the household was up and about and I am now pretty excited to watch the entire film.
We spend a lot of time and energy thinking and fretting about how much music and TV and film and writing is available to us now on the Internet and about what that means. How do we find the good stuff? How do we curate it? Is there too much? Does having access to everything all the time devalue any individual creative work? What happens to our focus and attention when we are adrift in a bottomless ocean of “content”?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I’m not sure there even are answers to any of these questions.
Generally, I think having access to more creative works is better than having access to fewer of them. I tend to think that the real change over the last decade or two is not about how much stuff we can watch or read or listen to. Rather, the real change is in how we approach all of it and our expectations—and our perception of other people’s expectations—regarding what we do with that.
Yes, there were fewer channels on TV when I was a kid and you either saw a movie in the theater or waited 2-3 years to catch the edited version on the ABC Sunday Night Movie. There was no phone in your pocket and the music you got to hear is what the local radio stations happened to be playing and what you could afford to buy on vinyl or cassette.
But even then, it was still more stuff than any one person could hope to read, watch, or listen to. Yes, there is more of it now but the idea that any person could Watch All the Things was no less ridiculous then than it is now.
What is different now is that we have these completionist expectations. If you haven’t listened to the 100 Greatest Albums or read the entire “Books You Have To Read Before You Die” list before you actually die, then you have somehow failed. You have to get your inbox to zero. You have to read every post in your feed, and god forbid you miss anything because if you do, then you have to declare feed reader bankruptcy. You have to track it all in spreadsheets and apps and Personal Knowledge Management systems because otherwise you might forget about something or miss something; otherwise, you will not be able to optimize your consumption and get to ALL OF IT.
This is crazy.
You’ll never get to all of it. You never could get to all of it. I guess maybe it was not so painfully obvious when I was a kid that I would not be able to get to all of it because it was not all immediately available to me at the same time.
Now it is, though. Being okay with not getting to everything—not listening to every album, not reading every post, not watching every show—requires a conscious decision. It requires making a judgement. I’m going to stop reading this book, and I’m not even going to bother with that one… I don’t need to catch up on this show I used to watch… that band has a new album out, but you know what? I don’t need to listen to it or have an opinion about it.