“Media consumption” is a phrase you hear a lot these days, and it bothers me.
Novels, plays, poetry, music, film—the entire human creative corpus is reduced to the status of consumer goods designed for instant obsolescence.
Rather than “read” Shakespeare, or “listen” to a Beethoven Symphony or “watch” Citizen Caine, we “consume” them, extracting their nutrients (I suppose) and excreting the waste.
In this new model we have no need to revisit, study or reflect upon these works. They have, after all, already been consumed and a new media product is being served up for the next round of ingestion and excretion.
The works themselves, it follows, are of little value and deserve no respect. What is paramount, however, is the system of consumption and our participation in it.
The idea is that we engage in a never-ending flow of sights, sounds and ideas. It is this process that provides the real subject of our interest and delight. The artifacts that comprise it, the all too overhyped “content,” is subordinate .
Things in themselves are evanescent and trivial. The machine that drives the process is permanent and awe-inspiring.
As we subsume ourselves into the machine, it’s only logical that consumption will extend to other aspects of our lives.
Why not consume love? Pets? Fathers and mothers? Husbands and wives?
Generosity could be consumed as well. Along with mystical insights and political revolutions.
Not to mention God. There’s no reason why the machine cannot provide us with a dazzling procession of Supreme Beings that can be consumed and disposed of ad infinitum.
And as each one of us becomes media ourselves, a data point of content in the the Grand Flow, as we cloak ourselves like lobsters in the hard exoskeletons of our “personal brands,” we too renounce any respect or attention that might have been afforded us in the past.
We consume others and they consume us in turn.