Wednesday is the day each week that I go to my favorite spot in town for wings. Wings have long been a favorite of mine, and now that I’m back where I went to college I find myself visiting my favorite watering hole but now I actually realize they have really good food.
Typically, I find my way to the bar because I’m a single guy and sitting at a table by yourself is just awkward. Bars have always been a place of social gathering for me, but three years ago when I stopped drinking I stopped going for a little while so the pressure to drink wasn’t over me all of the time.
It took over a year, but now I go out and drink an NA and the bar is back to being the place of social gathering. Anyway, I will usually strike up a conversation with anyone and tonight I was chatting with a guy about the Bellator MMA replays on the TV behind the bar.
As we were discussing the fights, he casually mentioned WWE's crowd sizes and I said that I’m not ashamed to be a fan of it and admit that I watch it every week.
“It’s like a soap opera for men,” I said. “I watch all of the PLEs as well.”
He wasn’t judging me at all, and said he grew up on WWE and is shocked it's still so popular. Then he mentioned the soap opera angle and said that he believes actual soap operas are still on TV. That whole idea got me to thinking about how content consumption has changed extensively during my lifetime, especially the last 20 years.
When I was a kid, I remember my mom and Nan (maternal grandmother) watched Guiding Light religiously. My mom also watched All My Children. These were two of the most popular soap operas of their time, and my mom worked during Guiding Light so she would tape it on our VCR and watch the episodes to catch up over the weekend. She recorded it so often that part of my recording of Ernest Goes to Camp as a kid was taped over by a small scene from Guiding Light.
Was my mom the first person to binge watch TV when she watched tape recordings of Guiding Light? Maybe, we always were a trendy bunch!
Flash forward to today, appointment television really doesn’t exist anymore. Even for sports, if you can stay off your phone, you can watch a game back in half the time if you just wait and DVR it. That allows people to get hours of their day back, while not really missing the action.
I am an avid watcher of the Apple TV show Shrinking. I don’t miss an episode, but whether I watch it on Wednesday afternoon, evening or Thursday evening is completely up to me. Entertainment has become incredibly accessible with the proliferation of streaming services such that weekly episodic content is no longer seen as something you have to watch in the moment it is actually on TV, if it runs live at all.
As my conversation at the bar continued, I mentioned to the guy I was talking to that I’m pretty sure soap operas are no longer a live broadcast at a set time and have actually become streaming only, possibly on Hulu. Think about that for a second - an entire genre was created for housewives to entertain themselves during the day but our lives are so hectic now and men and women are both in the workplace that an genre has faded off to obscurity.
Look it though, I’m all for social development and women in the workplace. But the whole idea of how we consume content has changed everything.
As a kid, I remember my dad used to wake up every morning at 5:30, make his coffee and turn on WGAL (Harrisburg-Lancaster-York NBC) to watch the morning news. Usually when I came downstairs at 6:30 to eat breakfast and get ready for school, he would turn on a cartoon or TV show for me and my brother and open up the newspaper to read the local news and his beloved sports page. On the weekends, he had to get the Harrisburg Patriot and sometimes he would even splurge for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
For the first 5-10 years of my adult life, I followed those same routines. I would wake up and watch Fox and Friends, drink a cup of coffee and read the Lewistown Sentinel online. Then I would go to DrudgeReport and read the national and world headlines.
Now my morning routine consists of five websites (including The Sentinel) and a cup of coffee while doing a few puzzles to get my brain in gear for the day ahead. I’m fortunate to work a remote job so I usually will listen to a podcast in the morning and turn on a TV show for background noise in the afternoon.
When I worked in an office, I listened to Bill Bennett's Morning in America on the drive to work, Glenn Beck from 9-Noon, Rush Limbaugh from Noon-3, Sean Hannity from 3-6 and Mark Levin from 6-8. I consumed commentary via talk radio for nearly 11 hours a day dating back to my time in college. Podcasts were just taking off as I got out of college, but they weren’t in the renaissance they are in now.
These shifts in behavior have taken place subtly over time. Of course, the proliferation of smart phones has increased the shift in content consumption the most, but technology in general has evolved how we consume content at even-faster speeds.
Is this really better for us though? I ask myself that question every day when I sit down to read something, then go back to see if the headlines have updated. The 24-hour news cycle started in the 90s with CNN and Headline News, but we have up-to-the-minute updates in our hands 24/7 now.
Has that made us smarter, wiser and more learned though? I would argue it probably hasn’t. It’s certainly led to information overload. Artificial Intelligence has led to the general public not being able to trust anything they read, see or hear as vetted information that is remotely factual. Social media has been the biggest propaganda machine the world has ever known.
As the calendar shifts to March and the days get longer, think about how you consume content. Are you consuming content in a healthy way that allows you to learn, grow and truly understand? If not, shift something. The biggest change I made, and it’s one I would suggest to anyone I have the privilege of talking to, is to reduce then completely eliminate social media use.
I removed social media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter) three-and-a-half years ago. Willfully, I’ll admit that the first two months were difficult. It had become such an important part of my day that I had become addicted and had to wean myself off of it. However, now I don’t miss it at all and if I need to know something I visit a reputable source for that information.
Make a meaningful change to ensure that the content you are consuming can enrich your life and allows you to contribute to conversation and the betterment of yourself and the people around you.