The Age of Production

I was born in 1988 and grew up mostly in the 90s and 00s.  When I was a kid, if anything became popular for a while and then faded away into obscurity it was called a Fad.  Fads typically lasted a few weeks, some lasted months, and a rare few lasted years.  Sometimes you'd have experiences and behaviours become fads or token objects like Pogs or YoYos in which case you'd sometimes refer to it as a novelty, these usually didn't last as long as a fad and typically weren't widespread - more often being people simply trying to do something differently and realising the reason it hadn't been done before with success was simply because it didn't work.

Today the concept still exists but the terminology has somewhat evolved; becoming a more globalised society the word of preference now is "trending" and it applies to everything now that comes and goes.  The major difference however is that most trends today don't last nearly as long as fads did.  In fact most trends now exist on social media and can last only a matter of hours, and in some extremes minutes, before the world moves on to something else.

We're reaching a point where it doesn't just feel like life is moving faster because of age - that feeling of time accelerating as you grow older which I have mentioned before - but more than this the increased pace of life can be measured and shown empirically to be accelerating not simply as a matter of opinion.

I grew up in the UK where most of our television shows throughout the previous century were in their entirety produced in the UK.  During that century as adoption of TV as an entertainment medium became widespread the thirst for content grew.  The number of channels grew, and eventually content started being imported from other nations.

One of the longest running TV shows in the world started in the UK called Coronation Street - a soap which has run for 58 years and has over 9,000 episodes to its name.  That long life is something of an anomaly now, not just in the UK but around the world.  There's a Wikipedia article that lists the longest running shows in the world and the surprising thing about it is that it's a lot shorter than you would probably expect.  That reinforces the rarity of a show that manages to last so long.

I rarely watch TV now, choosing like many, to stream instead.  The problem with that for broadcasters is that it can be very difficult to actually get people to watch your content.  To reach me personally you would have to rely on word of mouth.  I don't watch enough TV to see adverts, I don't follow accounts on social media that promote TV shows, I don't see ads on websites as I use AdBlock Plus and AdGuard DNS.  I don't tend to use Netflix to discover new content, I tend to go to it looking for something in particular.

There aren't many shows made today which manage to reach me, whose story lines or reputations become so prolific at pleasing their audiences that other people actually utter those words "You have to see this" - ironically this goes against the advertising mantra of on-demand services "making the unmissable, unmissable" - those services have actually increased the likelihood I will never see your content.  This isn't just true of TV though, it extends to Music with Spotify, and even videos uploaded to Youtube.  The amount of content that is created and never consumed, or at least only consumed by a very small number of people, is forever growing.

If each "age" of the Human race is defined by one thing more than anything else, then we've reached the Age of Production - having passed through the Age of Consumption and the Information Age.  We've arrived at the point where production has outpaced the rate of consumption to such an extreme that the glut will never be consumed.  Technology has made it possible for us to drowned in content if we even try, so instead we float on the surface, only consuming what comes to the top, with the sea of content below us swelling with each passing day becoming deeper and deeper.