Its so sad Kids can only snack on content these days

We have moved into the throw away culture, moan, moan, moan.

Henry Jenkins in his post concerning a Wired Mag article points out this from the Wired article

We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).

Jenkins observes

In a sense, this is a return to a very old idea that television of the future will be designed for zappers, that it will be designed in very small units which can make sense outside of any narrative context and that can be consumed whenever we want.

And

On a superficial level, much of popular culture looks as if it is designed for this kind of fragmented and short-term attention.

Jenkins goes onto to say

So, it is not hard for Wired to find film producers, say, who are skeptical about whether the feature film will continue to be the central form of cinema, Or to find radio programmers who think people are too antsy to sit still for an entire song, Or television critics who think that the previews are more entertaining than the programmes

I think what Jenkins is trying to say is BOLLOCKS.

Well, for one thing, it describes one aspect of a much more complex media ecology based on different modes of attention within the same individual and different styles of consumption across different segments of the population. The short form of the YouTube video or the "previously on" segment is no more representative of our current relationship to media than the 10 plus hours at a sitting marathon of friends watching a favorite television series on DVD, the 100 plus hour computer game, or the 700 page plus Harry Potter novel (itself one of seven novels that will be required to understand the full narrative, once the series is completed). Indeed, what we are seeing is that people are learning to skim media to find the stuff they really care about and then dig down deeper, anticipating that there will be enough there to sustain them for extended media experiences

In Snacklash the comment is made that

that snack culture is an illusion

And the point that Jenkins makes that

Moreover, as human beings, we rarely engage in activities that are meaningless to us. Just as good things can come in small packages, rich cultural experiences can and often do come in bite-size clusters. And so, even at the small scale, these are not trivial, random or capricious activities: we are involved in the production and circulation of meaning.

Is an often under appreciated point. One that occurred to me when reading Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Dancing in the Streets when she describes the rise of the self portrait as we as individuals in society became more self aware

Yet I have walked around galleries from the period Ehrenreich references, totally non aware that this is the defining story around the self portrait.

Comments

[tim harrap]

Reading this blog entry from the top, when I got to........
"I think what Jenkins is trying to say is BOLLOCKS."
I knew it wasn't written by Tomi!! :>
Tim

[ppf shipping]

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