- Fold laundry
- Wash the dishes left out from making pizza for last night’s dinner
- Do yoga
- Wash more dishes
- Do more yoga, and exercises to strengthen my recently-strained MCL
- Read some of the 50-100 tabs open to Economist and Atlantic articles I’ve been meaning to read for the last four months.
- Rearrange boxes of Christmas decorations and miscellaneous items in our apartment’s storage area
These are all the things I did while I listened to about two and a half episodes of David Cross’ podcast, Senses Working Overtime with David Cross, last Saturday morning. I discovered David Cross had a podcast shortly after I opened my laptop for the morning. IIf you’re not familiar with David Cross, he played Tobias Funke on Arrested Development. If you’re not familiar with Arrested Development, you’re not alone – almost no one watched the show when it aired, and that’s why it was unceremoniously cancelled after three seasons in 2006.
Please note: There’s a much, much longer and more detailed version of this post where I expand on these points, however, it’s also borderline unreadable. Here’s the abridged version for the meantime.
Here’s how I consumed two and a half episodes of Senses Working Overtime with David Cross:
- I opened my computer, opened youtube.com in my browser, and Youtube suggested five videos and one ad in a 3×2 grid, and started autoplaying the David Cross podcast when I hovered my mouse over it.
- None of the five videos were from a channel to which I had subscribed, but somehow, Youtube intuited I would probably watch a video from David Cross.
- If I had Youtube installed on my phone, once I installed Youtube on my phone, I could resume the video where I left off.
Consuming media in this way is an extremely recent development.
Prior to the advent of consumer grade internet and websites reliably hosting audio and video, consuming media in this way would have been well-nigh impossible.
If a comic started some sort of an interview show, I’d have to be in a radio market where the show were broadcast, and catch the episodes individually as they aired live. If I wanted to binge on multiple episodes, I’d either have to order cassette copies of the show, if the station made those available, or find a friend who had recorded the original broadcast on cassette tape and was willing to duplicate or send a copy of their tapes of the show. If the station didn’t sell tapes and I didn’t have friends who had recorded the show, I’d be out of luck.
The near-immediate availability of everything that has ever been made has fundamentally changed our relationship with media. However, the way I spent two hours Saturday morning wasn’t the result of me seeking out a specific piece of entertainment and then bingeing it, e.g. searching for Arrested Development and rewatching it for over two hours. Rather, out of the hundreds of millions of hours of content on Youtube, the site suggested a specific hour-long video, and subsequently showed me another two hours of content that I didn’t even know I would watch.
Anyway, I hope everyone had a nice weekend.