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A podcast I used to listen to would throw out seemingly random ideas and then try and debate the moral and ethical angles of it. One episode started with a prem

A podcast I used to listen to would throw out seemingly random ideas and then try and debate the moral and ethical angles of it. One episode started with a premise like “Netflix is the end of society”. The person arguing the affirmative called out something I’d not fully appreciated: binge watching of shows has killed what we used to call water cooler conversations. Prime time TV was a great provider of shared experiences most weeknights. Sunday evenings would be some just-released-to-TV blockbuster. And we’d roll into the office the next day and “omg! Did you see X last night?!” Of course they did, there was only like 3 channels back then (I’m in Australia, don’t laugh ;). But binge watching, catch-ups, streaming in all its form has sufficiently time shifted everything to the point we have low guarantees about having a shared experience. Or maybe I only managed to consume 2 episodes, and you watched them all. But you cant remember exactly about… “episode 2, is that the one… oh no that’s episode 3! Never mind”. We’re not able to have the same kind of free flowing conversations we used to. They also pointed out that sport is one of the last remaining shared in thine experiences that provide that offer similar opportunities. But it carries with it the factional tribalism the can push us away from someone as much as it can unite us. That was used as a jumping point to suggest this lack of shared experience has slowly broken our sense of togetherness and community. That in turn has fostered the kind of hostility to others that seems prevalent online. I found that a bit of a bridge too far. Though at the same time so much of the rest of the rationale actually resonated with my own experience, I’ve just not found the destination we’re at quite as bleak.

theshrike79 4y ago
Binge watching satisfies a small, but vocal, group of people. The super-fans with time to watch 15 hours of content in one sitting. The rest of us are just left out. Even if we get time to watch one or two episodes, we can't talk to the ones who binged it all, because they can't remember what happened in which episode. The only way to prevent spoilers is not to communicate at all. I like the Disney+ way of dumping 1-3 episodes straight away and then an episode every week, that allows the water cooler talk and fan theories to develop.
dan-robertson 4y ago
The lack of shared tv is older than just Netflix. Before satellite tv or digital tv when there were only a few channels, popular tv shows would get viewing figures that would be totally insane by todays standards (eg 10s of millions of people in the U.K.) so there would in theory be much more of a shared culture from it.
- ghaff 4y ago
  But even after cable TV, which is pretty ancient at this point, the networks--especially the Big 3--still mostly dominated viewership. There were occasional hits on channels like AMC, but it was mostly ABC, CBS, and NBC.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Makes you wonder what shared culture opportunities there were before TV (and radio).
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
It's a conversation I've had with colleagues, and I've heard it repeated online (red letter media) recently. I think it's slowly entering public consciousness and some streaming platforms have taken notice and are returning to episodic releases. Looking back from a personal standpoint, communal watching and discussion of those shared cultural phenomenons really marked my life. The most emblematic recent examples would be Lost and Westworld I think. But it's funny your comment about TV blockbusters, it shows it's been going on for much longer and we didn't realize it. My mother use to tell me often about her childhood in the 50s, how every week-end they would show the big blockbuster westerns with John Wayne on TV for a whole afternoon, and it's what everyone would watch and discuss afterwards. And it's just now that I make the connection with this phenomenon. Looking back at my childhood, I can't remember TV being anything but trash. (I think it varies wildly from country to country.) There were no blockbusters on TV, and Cinema played the role of providing that shared cultural experience. Now Cinema is dead and we're going to streaming. Who knows where it will end, but maybe there will be room for that experience to continue in another form.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >I think it's slowly entering public consciousness and some streaming platforms have taken notice and are returning to episodic releases. Furthermore, as streaming options proliferate, I assume that more people are hopping between services. Episodic releases don't totally solve that problem--but it does add some friction. Someone can't now signup for a service to watch the new hotness lots of people are talking about, binge watch, and then cancel their subscription.
Beldin 4y ago
Water cooler conversations weren't killed by binge watching, but that did remove a significant portion of possible conversations. Common things remaining are current events mostly (top of my head): gossip, politics, news, sports, work. Other stuff can still happen, eg. a colleague enthusiastically sharing something they learned or a discovery they made ("did you know how to properly use a paperclip?!"). But yeah, there's significantly less "things you probably also saw since yesterday and have an opinion about" stuff.
- timvdalen 4y ago
  I think I know, but is there anything special about how to properly use a paperclip I might have missed?
  - cauefcr 4y ago
    I am curious now, too, maybe it's about proper linkage for a paperclip-chain?
adbachman 4y ago
This is why I'm getting back into watching my local sports teams. There's nothing more civically uniting (in my city) than taking about the Ravens. If you can get over the geek, middlebrow dismissal of "sports ball" and the whole CTE thing, live local sports on TV crosses racial and class boundaries more than anything else I've witnessed in my 18 years living here.
- Brendinooo 4y ago
  The Ravens are the worst, but otherwise this is the correct take. I love how sports unifies the locals.
  - brandonmenc 4y ago
    s/ravens/ratbirds/
- ssully 4y ago
  I honestly wish I gave a shit about sports, because I feel like it's possibly one of the most unifying things amongst males imo. Growing up I always felt like I was playing on a slightly harder difficulty when it came to making friends because it seemed like everyone enjoyed sports but me so I had to make those early connections in other ways.
  - Li7h 4y ago
    Going to a live event can be a catalyst for how you feel about them. I used to hate sports as well, but live games have a certain energy about them that does not come through in television. Find a friend who likes a team and ask to go to a game with them.
    - ssully 4y ago
      Oh I do. I've gone to a number of games for every major team in my city (Chicago). I always have a good time. Some of that is because of the game, but I don't think it's surprising to say the people and environment are what makes a game fun to go to.
andai 4y ago
What did people talk about before TV?
- glenngillen 4y ago
  Society in general was just structurally much different back then. I’m projecting a lot from anecdotes from my parents and other elders, and so it’s a fairly limited sample of life in the outer suburbs of London & Dublin. But… Church and community groups played a much larger role. Sport was still as popular. You might “go see a show” but it seemed like a much bigger deal than going to the movies is today. My earlier comment wasn’t about people having something to talk about. It was that people were able to talk about an experience they both shared. Regularly. Like every week, if not every day (about watched they watched the previous night). I think maybe the other observation here is that before TV people were more likely to actually experience things together with others, and not just talk about them after the fact. Way out of my wheelhouse here though as I’m no historian.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >You might “go see a show” but it seemed like a much bigger deal than going to the movies is today. I'm not sure that's true. The studio system in Hollywood churned out a huge number of movies. Today (and really for a long time) my sense has been that going to the movies tends to be about younger people on dates, getting together with friends for a fairly low effort, not too expensive activity. And, probably for this reason, from what I can tell cinema attendance has sprung back better than a lot of people expected.
- ThinkingGuy 4y ago
  Radio
- rchaud 4y ago
  Radio, and before that, newspapers, the local sports teams, gossip about town.
- ssully 4y ago
  This is just an anecdote, but one of my favorite parts about reading Devil In The White City was the social aspect the World's Fair had on Chicago. The people of Chicago were very personally invested in winning the bid and making it a success because it was part of their city's identity, which in turn was a part of their identity. They wanted to show other cities that Chicago was able to do great things just like New York or Paris. It became a big part of general life for people in Chicago during that time.
afavour 4y ago
Strongly agreed. I graduated university just as Lost started airing. As much as people deride the show now it was a genuine phenomenon at the time and I maintain that talking about the hatch or Locke’s map was a huge social boost to me as I tried to figure out workplace social dynamics in my first real job. As a sibling commenter has said about the only equivalent left is sports and I begrudge having to engage with it.
- ratww 4y ago
  Oh, similar experience here. We'd often download the episode and watch at work too.
ghaff 4y ago
Binge watching and on-demand viewing aside, there's also just a lot more fragmentation of TV viewing. Even a hit streaming show like Game of Thrones has much lower viewership than hit network shows did at least in the US. But certainly the asynchronous watching has an effect too. "Everyone" watched Seinfeld etc. on Thursday night. Today, even for shows that drop weekly, most people are just out of the habit of watching shows as soon as they come out.
nonameiguess 4y ago
This has nothing to do with Netflix. Most television shows still get released on a week-by-week basis. It's more about the death of network television and proliferation of options. Everything is a paid service and people's subscriptions don't universally overlap. There is virtually nothing left that everyone watches (except the Super Bowl). No more Mash finales. There's kind of still tentpole film releases, but Covid put a serious damper on that for a few years, and globally the market is splitting with China and India developing their own gigantic film industries equal to Hollywood.
vxNsr 4y ago
This is actually the plot of a SNL skit, a bunch of friends are having dinner and each time they try to bring up a topic someone else stops them because they haven’t seen/experienced it yet. It starts out normal but get progressively more out there, I think the punchline is they can’t talk about the weather.
ArekDymalski 4y ago
>A podcast I used to listen to would throw out seemingly random ideas and then try and debate the moral and ethical angles of it. Can you share the name of this podcast please? Sounds very interesting.

theshrike79 4y ago

Binge watching satisfies a small, but vocal, group of people. The super-fans with time to watch 15 hours of content in one sitting. The rest of us are just left out. Even if we get time to watch one or two episodes, we can't talk to the ones who binged it all, because they can't remember what happened in which episode. The only way to prevent spoilers is not to communicate at all. I like the Disney+ way of dumping 1-3 episodes straight away and then an episode every week, that allows the water cooler talk and fan theories to develop.

dan-robertson 4y ago

The lack of shared tv is older than just Netflix. Before satellite tv or digital tv when there were only a few channels, popular tv shows would get viewing figures that would be totally insane by todays standards (eg 10s of millions of people in the U.K.) so there would in theory be much more of a shared culture from it.

ghaff 4y ago
But even after cable TV, which is pretty ancient at this point, the networks--especially the Big 3--still mostly dominated viewership. There were occasional hits on channels like AMC, but it was mostly ABC, CBS, and NBC.
wizofaus 4y ago
Makes you wonder what shared culture opportunities there were before TV (and radio).

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago

It's a conversation I've had with colleagues, and I've heard it repeated online (red letter media) recently. I think it's slowly entering public consciousness and some streaming platforms have taken notice and are returning to episodic releases. Looking back from a personal standpoint, communal watching and discussion of those shared cultural phenomenons really marked my life. The most emblematic recent examples would be Lost and Westworld I think. But it's funny your comment about TV blockbusters, it shows it's been going on for much longer and we didn't realize it. My mother use to tell me often about her childhood in the 50s, how every week-end they would show the big blockbuster westerns with John Wayne on TV for a whole afternoon, and it's what everyone would watch and discuss afterwards. And it's just now that I make the connection with this phenomenon. Looking back at my childhood, I can't remember TV being anything but trash. (I think it varies wildly from country to country.) There were no blockbusters on TV, and Cinema played the role of providing that shared cultural experience. Now Cinema is dead and we're going to streaming. Who knows where it will end, but maybe there will be room for that experience to continue in another form.

ghaff 4y ago
>I think it's slowly entering public consciousness and some streaming platforms have taken notice and are returning to episodic releases. Furthermore, as streaming options proliferate, I assume that more people are hopping between services. Episodic releases don't totally solve that problem--but it does add some friction. Someone can't now signup for a service to watch the new hotness lots of people are talking about, binge watch, and then cancel their subscription.

Beldin 4y ago

Water cooler conversations weren't killed by binge watching, but that did remove a significant portion of possible conversations. Common things remaining are current events mostly (top of my head): gossip, politics, news, sports, work. Other stuff can still happen, eg. a colleague enthusiastically sharing something they learned or a discovery they made ("did you know how to properly use a paperclip?!"). But yeah, there's significantly less "things you probably also saw since yesterday and have an opinion about" stuff.

timvdalen 4y ago
I think I know, but is there anything special about how to properly use a paperclip I might have missed?
- cauefcr 4y ago
  I am curious now, too, maybe it's about proper linkage for a paperclip-chain?

adbachman 4y ago

This is why I'm getting back into watching my local sports teams. There's nothing more civically uniting (in my city) than taking about the Ravens. If you can get over the geek, middlebrow dismissal of "sports ball" and the whole CTE thing, live local sports on TV crosses racial and class boundaries more than anything else I've witnessed in my 18 years living here.

Brendinooo 4y ago
The Ravens are the worst, but otherwise this is the correct take. I love how sports unifies the locals.
- brandonmenc 4y ago
  s/ravens/ratbirds/
ssully 4y ago
I honestly wish I gave a shit about sports, because I feel like it's possibly one of the most unifying things amongst males imo. Growing up I always felt like I was playing on a slightly harder difficulty when it came to making friends because it seemed like everyone enjoyed sports but me so I had to make those early connections in other ways.
- Li7h 4y ago
  Going to a live event can be a catalyst for how you feel about them. I used to hate sports as well, but live games have a certain energy about them that does not come through in television. Find a friend who likes a team and ask to go to a game with them.
  - ssully 4y ago
    Oh I do. I've gone to a number of games for every major team in my city (Chicago). I always have a good time. Some of that is because of the game, but I don't think it's surprising to say the people and environment are what makes a game fun to go to.

andai 4y ago

What did people talk about before TV?

glenngillen 4y ago
Society in general was just structurally much different back then. I’m projecting a lot from anecdotes from my parents and other elders, and so it’s a fairly limited sample of life in the outer suburbs of London & Dublin. But… Church and community groups played a much larger role. Sport was still as popular. You might “go see a show” but it seemed like a much bigger deal than going to the movies is today. My earlier comment wasn’t about people having something to talk about. It was that people were able to talk about an experience they both shared. Regularly. Like every week, if not every day (about watched they watched the previous night). I think maybe the other observation here is that before TV people were more likely to actually experience things together with others, and not just talk about them after the fact. Way out of my wheelhouse here though as I’m no historian.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >You might “go see a show” but it seemed like a much bigger deal than going to the movies is today. I'm not sure that's true. The studio system in Hollywood churned out a huge number of movies. Today (and really for a long time) my sense has been that going to the movies tends to be about younger people on dates, getting together with friends for a fairly low effort, not too expensive activity. And, probably for this reason, from what I can tell cinema attendance has sprung back better than a lot of people expected.
ThinkingGuy 4y ago
Radio
rchaud 4y ago
Radio, and before that, newspapers, the local sports teams, gossip about town.
ssully 4y ago
This is just an anecdote, but one of my favorite parts about reading Devil In The White City was the social aspect the World's Fair had on Chicago. The people of Chicago were very personally invested in winning the bid and making it a success because it was part of their city's identity, which in turn was a part of their identity. They wanted to show other cities that Chicago was able to do great things just like New York or Paris. It became a big part of general life for people in Chicago during that time.

afavour 4y ago

Strongly agreed. I graduated university just as Lost started airing. As much as people deride the show now it was a genuine phenomenon at the time and I maintain that talking about the hatch or Locke’s map was a huge social boost to me as I tried to figure out workplace social dynamics in my first real job. As a sibling commenter has said about the only equivalent left is sports and I begrudge having to engage with it.

ratww 4y ago
Oh, similar experience here. We'd often download the episode and watch at work too.

ghaff 4y ago

Binge watching and on-demand viewing aside, there's also just a lot more fragmentation of TV viewing. Even a hit streaming show like Game of Thrones has much lower viewership than hit network shows did at least in the US. But certainly the asynchronous watching has an effect too. "Everyone" watched Seinfeld etc. on Thursday night. Today, even for shows that drop weekly, most people are just out of the habit of watching shows as soon as they come out.

nonameiguess 4y ago

This has nothing to do with Netflix. Most television shows still get released on a week-by-week basis. It's more about the death of network television and proliferation of options. Everything is a paid service and people's subscriptions don't universally overlap. There is virtually nothing left that everyone watches (except the Super Bowl). No more Mash finales. There's kind of still tentpole film releases, but Covid put a serious damper on that for a few years, and globally the market is splitting with China and India developing their own gigantic film industries equal to Hollywood.

vxNsr 4y ago

This is actually the plot of a SNL skit, a bunch of friends are having dinner and each time they try to bring up a topic someone else stops them because they haven’t seen/experienced it yet. It starts out normal but get progressively more out there, I think the punchline is they can’t talk about the weather.

ArekDymalski 4y ago

>A podcast I used to listen to would throw out seemingly random ideas and then try and debate the moral and ethical angles of it. Can you share the name of this podcast please? Sounds very interesting.