The Good Bit

How high do you believe is your tolerance of mediocrity?  In an increasingly digital world where more and more of what we do is on-demand, the element of control when it comes to the content we consume is shifting more to the individual, to the consumer, rather than the distributor.  Take television as an example.  There was a time when it was broadcast, with a set schedule, which you had to adhere to if you wanted to consume the content it offered.  Then came video recorders which allowed people to record TV shows to watch at a time they wanted, and thus the transference of control began.

Recording a TV show required a lot more effort than it does today.  You needed a VHS, a recorder, you had to either record it at the time it was being aired manually - which defeats the point - or you had to set it to record, which required knowing the time and date and channel and manually entering this information.  When PVRs and DVRs came along, [Personal/Digital Video Recorders] the process was simplified.  The likes of Sky+ and TiVo made it easier for people to record things at the touch of a button.   Yet again, more power shifted.

Fast forward to the present and we have on-demand services where we can select the programmes we want to watch and play them, there's no need to have recorded it in the first place because the content streams to you from the provider when you want to.  For advertisers that presented a problem because they lost the ability to target advertisements to wider audiences based on viewing figures, and as was the problem when VHS was around, people simply skip the ads. 

While advertisers may not get much sympathy from people, there are a group of people involved in this whole process which are overlooked - the content creators.  When television had a set schedule that had to be adhered to for fear of missing out, those creators had a lot more leniency when it came to holding the viewer's attention.  When you control the content yourself however, there is no requirement to consume the entirety of the content.  When you control the content you consume you can skip the crap and get to the good bit. 

There are two arguments you can make given this deference of control.  One is to say that this is good for content consumers in that it forces the creators to make higher quality content which is more consistent in its entertainment value so as to make the entire thing "the good bit" without anything you would want to skip.  The other argument is to say that having content comprised 100% of "good bits" is unrealistic and can never be achieved.  I don't think the issue is as black and white as this, but to entertain these two points of view it leaves a question.  Have we progressed beyond order, and entered into chaos?  The more you give people control, the harder it becomes to predict what they will do with it.  Which makes you question how a content creator is meant to achieve a narrative without being linear.

There are few mediums that work with non-linear consumption.  Games are perhaps the best example as many games allow you to explore a world in your own way.  Music would be another example as most people who buy albums will inevitably have favourite tracks they listen to more than others and for most I would say the ritual of listening to an album in order of track number is something that has all but been forgotten, saved only for the first time they play an album to see what each track is like - but even at that I would not be surprised if the majority skipped through each track to find which ones they liked most first.

From all I have said there remains to be only two mediums of entertainment that are resistant to disorder, they would be the Theatre, and Books.  I would argue these two are perhaps the only two that can't be broken down by this change in control.  With Theatre the audience must sit and watch and consume at a pace controlled by the performance itself - be that live action through plays or be it through cinema.  As for Books and reading there are very few books where you will be able to follow the story if you were to read the chapters out of order, and fewer still where one would return and only read one chapter from that book. 

As a final note, I would like to return to the argument that deference of control will force content creators to produce higher quality content.  The trend of deferring control of consumption to the consumer is one that has been growing long-term.  It's not something new, and it has been influencing the content we consumer for many years now.  As far as the argument of motivation to create increased quality content is concerned I would like to invite you to explore this thought on your own, consider the evidence, and the way content has evolved over the past decade or two, and decide for yourself whether the quality of that content has increased or decreased, and ponder what the cause of that change has been.