The content overload
How we lost a shared mainstream... and why Twitter fosters cult dynamics.
Culturally it feels like nothing matters these days, rightly or wrongly, because we live in a world where everything is continuously available at once - at least when it comes to music, film, TV, books, journalism and so on. One effect of everyone curating their own personal diet of content is that there is essentially no mainstream anymore, which in turn means there is no real counter-culture either.
With instant digital access the new norm, it’s a lot harder for cinemas to attract customers when they can stream pretty much any film they want at home. Radio has to compete against a near-infinite number of podcasts. And the entire concept of owning a CD or DVD is falling by the wayside. The streaming revolution has obvious upsides, but a clear downside is the overwhelming glut of content and the knock-on effects this has: even truly great shows, films and albums have trouble standing out and finding an audience now because there’s just so much of everything and they get subsumed in the flood. Things are bombing more and more not because they’re bad, but because they don’t get found by the right audience or found at all, especially if they’re not about a hot-button topic.
This atrophy of the mainstream extends into politics and society too. The way in which broadcast media and print journalism lost their authority over the course of the 2010s while online media thrived but drifted to extremes – because polarisation drives engagement – means we as citizens don’t agree on basic facts or share the same reality anymore, especially when you add in YouTube conspiracy theorists, viral Facebook posts and deranged WhatsApp groups. The atomisation of audiences in the West also means there’s far less media made for multigenerational viewing, something as formerly mundane as three generations of a family sitting down to watch a comedy or drama together. Even a property like Star Trek, which used to epitomise this ideal, is now full of graphic violence and crudity. Take British comedy – there’s still fantastic stuff being made, particularly many of the BBC Three sitcoms and mockumentaries of recent years. But they’re all for niche audiences, and the only mainstream scripted UK comedies aimed at whole families are absolutely dire. Something like One Foot In The Grave – an intelligent, subversive, often controversial show that used to regularly pull in 16 million viewers per episode in a primetime slot on a mainstream channel – just wouldn’t get commissioned today. It feels like big sports events and Marvel blockbusters are the only unifying, mainstream things we have left. Meanwhile, the tyranny of choice leaves me outfaced by stacks of unwatched films, tabs of unread articles and shelves of unread books, and the instinctive reaction is to shut down, stop trying to follow it all and do something else entirely.
One of our worst misconceptions is that art should be “entertaining” and that the worst thing a film can do is fail to entertain. In 2021 there were a couple of good dramas about dementia on release – Supernova and The Father – and I even saw these being criticised along the same lines in audience reviews online, for failing to be “entertaining” or for being “slow” (an accusation levelled at pretty much anything that’s dialogue- and character-focused). This expectation that films should titillate and shepherd us, as well as a mistaken assumption that protagonists should be likeable and that a film should give you someone to root for, also results in audiences misunderstanding acerbic, scabrous films like The Favourite, Southland Tales and Vox Lux. I thought the latter was extremely incisive in its diagnosis of the modern Western condition – a hyperreal society of the spectacle, where nothing has value but everything has a price, and where even personal trauma is something ripe for exploitation.
Film criticism overall remains in fairly good health, but it’s notable that American and British critics go much easier on big-budget Hollywood films than, say, French critics do. I can’t put it better than Julian Darius in his essay on Guardians Of The Galaxy: “As I write this, there are scores of critics, schooled in storytelling, who are swallowing what they know to be true, burying their criticisms in parentheticals and sentences that appear to be modifying generally positive reviews, simply because these critics are also intelligent enough to recognise that our culture is awash in a sea of stupid, in which the grossest of infractions of basic narrative logic are routinely forgiven because computer-animated anthropomorphic raccoons flying out of explosions look cool.”
Why I will never promote this Substack on social media
I quit Facebook permanently back in 2013 and have never been on Instagram, but I was seriously addicted to Twitter in the 2010s. I left it several times but always ended up coming back. Weaning myself off it was gradual – in 2016 I set my account to protected, then two years later I reduced my followers from over 2000 to about 200, out of a desire to only have a select audience and know exactly who I was sharing my thoughts with. But even in that protected bubble, I felt more and more uncomfortable with the panopticon nature of the platform, where everything you say and every tweet you like is visible to everyone else. It’s not a natural mode of communication and brings a whole set of odd, cultish group dynamics with it. There were people I simply didn’t wish to associate with but was still connected to out of politeness because we had mutual friends. Others whose tweets were becoming more and more intense and eccentric and who seemed to be living their entire life on and through the platform. In 2020, I decided to disable the account completely so that I wasn’t following anyone and wasn’t followed by anyone – getting rid of the constant feed of information and removing my own audience was the only way to stop myself from being tempted to return.
The period when Twitter started to take off around a decade ago was also the period when a lot of my real-life friends started pairing up, settling down, having kids and moving to the suburbs, as well as when I became self-employed, so I gradually found myself a lot more socially isolated than I had been in the 2000s. Twitter was an outlet and a way to make friends, one where I could exist as pure words, and I never approached it as online-only – over the best part of a decade I met 60-70 people I’d gotten to know through Twitter in real life, whether at events or just for coffee. Most of them were perfectly likeable, and a handful have turned into real-life friendships or client relationships that have stood the test of time, but one or two were users with large follower counts who tweeted constantly about social justice but in real life were manipulative and abusive – not necessarily to me but to other friends I’d introduced them to. That’s when my eyes started to open to the fact that there are people like that in pretty much every religious organisation, charity and progressive activist campaign, because being able to cloak yourself in a benevolent cause is like catnip to certain types of disturbed individual, as it’s the perfect shield.
Twitter gave me a lot of confidence in my own voice and writing and helped me forge good connections that have lasted, even leading to paid work and conference invitations. There were also times when the power of having a public platform went to my head, or when my unhappiness manifested itself in how I acted online. After almost three years off Twitter, my brain feels calm and I feel whole - without that nagging sense of being soul-split, that part of me exists in my body and part in cyberspace. When we use tools, our brain conceptualises them as an extension of ourselves, and heavy social media use normalises this so much we scarcely notice it anymore: this feeling of being spread too thin, of existing in too many places. Even just a WhatsApp group gives me the same sensation, making me feel monitored and bringing out the needy performer in me. I’ve come to the conclusion that if you invest more time in your online self than in your real one, the former can start to take over and parasitically consume the latter, until one day you might find yourself in a plastic surgery clinic having dog ears grafted onto your head to look like your Snapchat selfie. When we use technology, we are used by technology, and it’s this underdevelopment of the real self and its colonisation by the overdeveloped online self that’s driving so much of the strange dynamics we see in Western society at the moment.