yes the modern anxiety over spoiler alerts I think is very closely tied to the "watch once and forget" culture. It also always reminds me of that Hitchcock ane

yes the modern anxiety over spoiler alerts I think is very closely tied to the "watch once and forget" culture. It also always reminds me of that Hitchcock anecdote where he talks about the difference between surprise, which is not knowing that the bomb is under the table, to suspense, the viewer seeing the bomb but it not going off. The former is five seconds of surprise, the latter is 15 minutes of tension. Point being that keeping the viewer in the dark is in many ways the lowest form of creating excitement. And it seems way to common nowadays both in how we watch and how stories themselves are constructed around this.