Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
Ads are destroying everything. IDK how much of any industry’s budget goes to ads, but whatever it is, the consumer is paying for it in multiple ways even if you don’t want the thing being advertised. It’s baked in to the cost of the product or service. It’s shoved in your face driving down the highway or listening to music, or even on your refrigerator. And they do their best to handcuff you by withholding some facet of your product or service unless you watch the ad or at least permit it to be displayed even if you already paid for the thing you get the ad on. Youtube is utter garbage with everyone filling space in their videos with maddeningly useless fluff and shallow chatter (like and subscribe!) to increase the adspace available do so their videos get pushed to the top.
Entertainment? IDK, it feels like people haven’t had an original thought in decades. It’s rehashing or reviving old ideas in worse ways. Music is lyrically and musically shallow (yeah, pop music has always been mostly like this) but it seems like it’s overrun with low-effort junk. We have almost no artists who can actually weave a story into a listenable and desirable form. Maybe some indy stuff is good, but some people seem to think that different and obscure suckiness is good because it’s not mainstream suckiness.
Even books are shit a lot of the time. It’s like every author has to dumb down the book and write it as close to movie format as possible so they can hopefully get just that - get a movie deal. NYT bestsellers are emotionally manipulating triumphs, failures, Lifetime TV crap designed to be consumed on airplanes after your third vodka tonic makes it seem deep and meaningful while you’re stuck in that middle seat.
I rarely watch any TV at all. No broadcast or cable channels at all. Some streaming. I might try out a dozen books before I find anything that sticks.
Entertainment has been fully consumed in a desperate churn to be the next short-lived viral “thing.” There are too few who take the time and effort to actually create material instead of being the 150th person to make a reaction video to some clip. So yeah, I think you’re right. Things have become incredibly shallow and short-lived as desperate people fight for their viral hook and ad money.