I caved: in two ways, this weekend. Caved, in the sense that with it being so cold outside; being too bothersome to tour around town, plus being sick, I holed up here at home all weekend. My vision became too strained and made blurry by cold-medication to track any fine print, plus I lost too much lucidity to allow me to follow and mentally form any literary scenes in my mind from reading, so the other way I caved was re-subscribing to a TV service of sorts. A few days ago, I knocked some dust of my TV screen, and connected to a month long free trial of Netflix®, and I abused this privilege to the max during this weekend.
I had a good long spell of not needing a paid television service to entertain me (ten months), but being under the influence of Neo Citron perhaps weakened my resolve. I could still get some odd bits of programming, news and movies (if I wanted to) on TV through channels via my Sony Blu-Ray player and Wi-Fi network, but nothing was offered that could keep me mindlessly gluing my eyes to a screen for hours during a day (a good thing really). I find that the free movie channels, like Crackle®, have content that's too dated and festering with commercials that can't be skipped through. I just sit down with it to be a tech-geek: to explore and review it intensively around once a month, or so; not to really watch the programming per se, but to study the interactive features and formats of the Sony network system, and to see if there are any useful changes and updates. Through this setup, I get to peer into other foreign news and documentary networks/services, like Deutsche Welle, and some of the Russian programmes through Первый канал (First Channel) out of curiosity to see their perspective of the world, or else I tune into a couple of Latin American channels to see much Spanish I still understand (or be humbled, and see how much I've forgotten). I do also check out snippets from Blinkx, Wired, Epicurious, Livestrong, some video podcasts, and then I'll check and see if the YouTube interface through a TV remote is getting any less user-hostile. That's about as interesting as TV has been for me at home since I discontinued service with my former provider.
So, suffering through my cold trying to rest, I spent an abominable amount of time (for me) with my ass planted on the chesterfield all weekend watching movies and other programs through Netflix. There has been such a huge gap in my media diet with unwatched shows and films, and so with no real mental ability for reckoning of passing time, it was easy to allow myself to get sucked into this black hole. Today, I opted to leave the TV off and use this time to process it all. What is interesting (and kind of creepy) about Netflix, and other similar services, is that I don't even have to actively search that hard for the movies and shows that appeal to me, because from the first few choices that I've opted to watch, the Netflix system starts monitoring my viewing choices through my account, and begins building a profile of my viewing habits, and then narrows down, filters, and limits things to a more concise menu of some suggested shows that it predicts that I'm most likely to watch to some very pinpoint accurate and specific genres. It struck me then that there is something a little insidious about a digital entertainment system that knows what my favoured viewing interests and pleasures are better than I do. I watched the movies Layercake, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Centurion, The Gods Must be Crazy II, the documentary Walking With Cavemen, and an episode of Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior, and some other junk. I guess what I discovered I'm into, from watching Netflix, which is watching me watch TV, is what it is recommending to me as future choices. It's automatically narrowing them down and forecasting that I'd be into Guy Ritchie British gangster movies, crime thrillers, historical/nature/science documentaries, science fiction, and action cinema (that's unnervingly accurate). The system has somehow also determined that I have enough of a quirky sense of humour, and a taste for foreign/independent films that the Netflix search engine presumes to recommend to me a set of movies centred around starring my "favourite" actors (I'll leave them a mystery), a Norwegian sex comedy, and other documentaries on rather eccentric subject material. It boggles my mind to think of all the specific variable categories, cross-referencing, and correlation of all this data to get this all so customized for me as a viewer.
Profiling of the media consumer has always been going on since mass media has been invented, and evolving rapidly into ever more intrusive ways for gathering some ever more revealing data about those who are the audience/consumers. It then becomes almost a laughable paradox to see so many, who call themselves "private" people, who are so distrustful and not prone to socializing with others in the 'real world'*, who so often opt to stay home and retreat into watching a lot of TV, or using the Internet** because they can find little else to do by themselves that keeps them engaged mentally. Yet, watching television, or using the web, in this present day, are perhaps the least "private" activities that one can do. Someone, or some organized intelligence gathering entity, is always monitoring your choice of media, inter/activity, and usage.
*- Having a flashback now of the movie The Matrix, when Morpheus asks Neo that very profound question: "What is real?"
**- I always kind of wondered why we (as English speakers/readers) find the word 'Internet' consistently capitalized? Is it because it's regarded as proper noun for a place name or something geographical (which it isn't), or is it because we are regarding it now as a proper name for something that's like a living sentient being, like John, or Mary, or Goober the hamster? The lack of use of the indefinite article is suspicious too: I've yet to see a case of 'an internet' in any formal writing. I'll leave these questions of semantics to open for debate for some other time. I'm also having the horrid realization that this thought resembles one like those circulated around the dining table at work . . . I HAVE TO GET OFF THIS WRETCHED MEDICATION!
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