Plenty of us have fallen down the new TV-binge rabbit hole more than once in the past few years. It’s a nice change of pace every now and again, instead of patiently waiting for the next installment just plowing through 5, 6, or 10 episodes on a weekend. Adult life? Eh, it’ll still be there on Monday.
What goes by the wayside in the meantime, though? James Pearson’s essay on coming back to America and the media deluge that awaits him provides some answer:
When I left Uganda this winter I had finally broken the 300-page barrier in David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest. I’ve started it three or four times in the past and aborted each time for attentional reasons. But 300 pages felt like enough momentum, finally, to finish. Then I hit my first American airport, with its 4G and free wi-fi. All at once, my gadgets came alive: pinging and alerting and vibrating excitedly. And even better, all seven seasons of The West Wing had providentially appeared on Netflix Instant. I’ve only finished 100 more pages in the two months since…
It’s an addictive kind of media parasite that promises to keep sucking up more and more and more of our time.
In an ironic twist, Wallace himself (who wrote on seductive comforts of mediocre shows) predicted the future of perfectly addictive entertainment in Infinite Jest, in which he imagined a movie so astoundingly awesome that everybody who started watching it would keep watching it … until they died.
Per Pearson:
In 2009, according to the media research company eMarketer, the average U.S. adult consumed about 10 hours and 32 minutes of media per day. (That’s including multitasking, so if you spend an hour browsing on your iPad while watching TV, that counts as two hours.) By 2012 that total was up over an hour to 11:39 per day. That’s almost eight hours more per week, per person. Now multiply that by America…
The question is what is being supplanted by all this media space? We probably already know and the answer isn’t a comforting one.
