Unhealthy Consumption

I've spent the last week and a couple days watching movies, playing games and reading stories. The current period has presented itself with a plethora of occasions to spend it consuming content. With how disrupted the world has become, many others have sought solace in social and entertainment media of all kinds and forms. With the various opportunities for observation, especially when certain industries in entertainment are experiencing a brief increase in metric performance regarding financials, it's clear that more people are able to consume content than any other time in the recent past. Part of that made me think about our roles as consumers, and how easy it is to do so in an unhealthy manner.

Storytelling is a permeable art form. It streams through all of humanity, taking with it the sediment of it's societies and cultures. While it is not inherently anthropological, at the very least it offers insights into the mind of man. Once a story enters the realm of products however, it gets packaged into a consumable and marketed. It's given a price, a location where it can be acquired and promotional material to give it as much attention as possible. It is protected by the laws of nations (most nations, at the very least) and it becomes possible to prescribe some metric of value towards it. Those consumables become standalone art, disconnected from any supplementary material that may have inspired or directly produced because of it.

In this form, such stories become impervious to the sculpting of cultural osmosis. It's immediate nature cannot be contorted, not without acquiring appropriate licences or directly receiving permission from it's creators. It's form becomes tied to media; an organised means of creating art. For this reason, products that contain stories need to be adopted cautiously by an audience, and shouldn't be observed with the same cavalier as a strictly organic story. Unfortunately, a lot of consumers make this mistake and become attached to spiralling narratives, which are the products of brands and organisations. These entities are too far removed from the heart of a story, and don't necessarily have the same desire to keep it beating that the consumers have. Such is the perils of mass media.

Getting overly attached

In the recent past, many popular franchises have attempted to detach their existing audience for a new one. The logic states that by moving their focus from their already assembled audience, they can gain a fresh one that is much more numerous, diverse, and more accepting of the content they produce, thus increasing sales and profits. The execution of such ideas has only had mixed results, which hardly proves the hypothesis. The companies that own these franchises forget that their existing audiences are fragile, and that the brands they cultivate may have changed, but the appeal of the stories they had developed are timeless. This disconnect has created a rift between the producers and the consumers of mass media. Without a doubt, the origins of this rift are political.

Remember what I said about stories containing, at the very least, the experiences of society and culture? Well, imagine that being the case for the audience of said franchises. It should surprise no one when narratives are irrevocably changed from their origins, that the same audience with this connection vocally disapprove. The negative reaction is only natural for such attached individuals to see what they feel a connection to, being dismantled and recreated in such haphazard fashion. It only encourages the hostility when the situation appears to stem from complete mismanagement of a franchise and it's storytelling. The result of this is the inevitable culture war that we have seen occur during the last few decades. The irony is that the attachment these consumers feel towards their products, is also the same fuel that allows the cycle to continue in the first place. Producers create stories that consumers want to consume. By altering this binary relationship, producers will reduce the amount of consumers, thus lowering the output of stories they can create. The cycle begins to slow down. The worst of it will come when it finally stops.

When the wheels detach

People are attracted to aesthetics. This simple fact appears to be lost on large organisations that produce the most content for consumers. Appearance is not everything however, and it is more likely that the disregard for aesthetics is intentional. The unfortunate reality of this is that most eyes are expected to show the same interest in mediocre content, that they have in high quality work. The large organisations set the industry standard for the smaller organisations and individuals to follow. With the ease that mediocrity can be produced, the supply of said low quality content will only increase. As the supply increases, especially for established brands, the consumers who were once attached and expressed displeasure will slowly distance themselves from what they used to consume. Demand continues to drop, yet supply is somehow increasing. This paradox only spreads the rift further. What we get from all of this is oversaturation.

The only future will be collapse.

Oversaturation isn't the death knell however. The first sign that follows is a scramble for USPs. Unique Selling Points are elements that distinguish a product from any other, and make them more appealing to an audience. USPs allow content to stand out from the rest of the pack. This is gauged by interest (demand) and consumption (sales). The data that follows successful products is analysed for potential USPs, which are then used as the model for other products as well.

The contradiction begins once USPs need to be produced quickly, as the oversaturation requires quick to produce ideas to garner flash-in-the-pan sales figures. Too much content to push with little time to push it, ends up strangling products of any opportunity to produce depth. To keep up with the USP demand, gimmicks become the focus. As gimmicks are by definition "very shallow tricks or devices", are quick to make and easy to replicate, they end up lowering the quality of already mediocre content. The spiral downward is accelerated with such a radical approach to incompetent creation.

The only "saving grace" is when consumers begin to lower their standards. However, this is a short lived victory. If consumers accept mediocre content from the professionals, they will only encourage the degradation of quality even further. Consumers are left with a Catch 22. By accepting the decline in quality, they encourage further works of that nature. By declining the lapse in quality, consumers will latch onto effective USPs with similar gimmicks, resulting in similar low quality content being produced. Eventually there will be no possible way to distinguish between a large organisation that can produce a multitude of content, and a lone amateur that can only produce mediocrity. The industry that powers the producer / consumer relationship would've effectively broken the cycle. Thus, the collapse will be complete.

Answering the question

So what is the solution? The answer is that there is none. What we are seeing is merely a continuation of the cycle that has always been. Human societies do not always progress. They go through entropy. They collapse. They degrade. They rebuild. They succeed. They repeat. Ad nauseaum.

Eventually, when the dust has settled, narratives will begin to take root in the undergrowth. Little pockets of plot will weave together, eventually breaking through the very earth. Stories that speak to the heart of man will shoot towards the sky once more.

The only requirement is time. Time, and the understanding that the cycle will repeat all over again. Thus is the nature of consumption. Until things deteriorate, consumption of mass media will continue to be unhealthy. The only healer is time.