Reading Alone

Here's a major tension I see at the heart of modern media:

• people want to make and share their own writing/videos/art
• people want to read/watch/consume things they personally enjoy
• people want to read/watch/consume what their friends are enjoying

I don't see how we can consistently get all three.

There's only a few possible models (that I can see) for media.

The first model is the fabled broadcast television oligopolies of the 50s-80s: there was a technological bottleneck (the genuine scarcity of usable broadcast frequencies), which meant that there were only a handful of channels in each country,[^1] which meant that

1) people who wanted to make shows were gatekept by the few, powerful producers of these channels
2) people who wanted to watch shows could only (easily) watch the things that the channels chose to broadcast
3) people could very, very easily co-ordinate to watch The Same Things Your Friends Were Watching, and have common ground to discuss with strangers at the pub.

The second model is what now exists with books, since Kindle and self-publishing came around: there are an unbelievable number of books, supposedly 4 million each year, of which 500k are traditionally published and 3.5m are self-published. This means that
1) anyone who wants to can write a book
2) you can find a book for any particular eight-modifier personal interest
3) it's maddeningly rare to have any pieces of media that are popular enough to be co-ordination points for any meaningful % of the population.

In a sense, this whole thing is just a microcosm of the problem of modernity: the conflict between individualism and community, with everyone wanting the privilege of doing the things they like at the time that's convenient for them, but also wanting the community of doing things with other human beings. I don't see how we solve this, truly? I don't see how we can get both.

[^1]: This might be a fake memory but I'm pretty sure I remember the launch of UK Channel 5, which happened only in 1997 (!), and required a massive campaign to fix 9 million home video recorders that used the necessary bit of spectrum they were budging into before the channel could go live.

I don't remember this directly but the first broadcast was apparently The Spice Girls doing a cover of Manfred Mann's 5-4-3-2-1, which is nice.