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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The fragmentation of media exposure due to technological change is a really interesting phenomenon. I had small taste of what it must’ve been like in the US in the 1950s and 1960s because in Bangladesh we only had one television channel and aside from domestic news and soap operas the main draw was American network shows like Star Trek: TNG. Everyone watched the same thing because there was literally nothing else to watch. Even as a kid in the US in the 1990s, prime time was dominated by the four networks. Even kids knew what “Friends” was about because their parents all watched it. Today I couldn’t even tell you the prime time lineup of any network. The decline in attendance at movie theaters has had a similar effect. You can’t take for granted that everyone has seen the latest Bond movie.

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One of my favorite media exposure statistics is that 105 MILLION people watched the series finale of the show MAS*H [0]. In fact, of the top 10 most watched broadcasts in US television history, the other 9 are Super Bowls.

I also feel like we are in the middle stage of the fragmentation. Netflix etc meant that my set of shows might not overlap with your set of shows but some shows are still popular amongst a bunch of people.

The next step, which feels not that far off, is where you tell Netflix AI: "Hey, I want a movie with Charlton Heston, Ariana Grande and Abraham Lincoln set on a space station, go." And it then generates it for you.

With that level of customization and personalized media, I wonder if we will feel even more fragmented culturally as we lose these common narratives and touch points.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_televisio...

> With that level of customization and personalized media, I wonder if we will feel even more fragmented culturally as we lose these common narratives and touch points.

The thing is, people like having these common narratives. They like talking with their friends about ongoing stories, they like telling their friends about new interesting things that they're watching. I don't think any sort of system without that would work. I just don't think it's what people want out of their media.

The funny thing is, the companies themselves muddy the water significantly. By buying critic websites, critics and and raising there own numbers for cultural relevance and viewers. But money does not lie, and as soon as the audience has to pay for something, the real viewerbase shows some streaming empires naked.

"Today I couldn’t even tell you the prime time lineup of any network."

This observation really hit home, and I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure what the implication is. But you're totally right with the observation. We've lost some societal glue.

We didn't lose it, so much as we gave it away when we had the opportunity. The choice provided by the Internet -> streaming dissolved that glue as each of us chose what to watch according to our own preference.

I think there is a larger phenomena at play here. We are learning that if every human has complete freedom to choose where they get the information that forms their intellectual environments, our society becomes more fragmented and the people in those societies become more separated from the people physically close to them.

It's almost like humans need some constraints in order to form robust and resilient communities/society. Intuitively this makes sense, as our ancestors which gave us our society had (from our perspective) incredibly uniform intellectual environments.

The same could be said of radio stations to Spotify, Bandcamp and the like. Once upon a time everyone listened to the same radio programs because that's all there was, then records came.. Technology has been splitting us into separate cultures hard for a good long while now. Probably even created the idea of a teenager.

> The decline in attendance at movie theaters has had a similar effect. You can’t take for granted that everyone has seen the latest Bond movie.

You can count on most everyone seeing the hits, still. The recent Avatar and Top Gun sequels, whatever the latest pump and dump from comic book or Jurrasic Park franchises, for example.

I know a lot more people who never go into franchise movies than those that do and even those are loosing interest in sequel trash

Paramount and Skydance's “Top Gun: Maverick” was the highest-grossing domestic release in 2022[0], generating $719 million in ticket sales.. I think there is more than that on this equation.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/10/top-gun-maverick-disney-top-...

At $10/ticket, that's 72 million people. About 1 out of 5 people if those are the US figures and not worldwide.

And I dunno about you, but at least around here, tickets have been closer to $15-20 for a while.

I haven't seen any movies in theaters since before the start of the pandemic.

I haven't seen any of those. We know that most people haven't seen any particular one of those three, because we (vaguely, with a huge effort) know how many tickets they've sold.

How can you count on that? I haven't seen either of those nor do I know anybody that has. There's too many movies going through to be able to see them all. Maybe for people that are super into them but not everybody is.

Nope, haven't seen anything you listed.

I don't even _know_ anyone who has seen these movies.

I know one, but I'm not sure that reflects our preferences since a lot of people have been, and still are, avoiding movies theaters due to covid.

I think we'll get more people seeing big blockbuster movies once covid and other viruses aren't such a concern.

The median American used to see zero movies a year (in a theatre).

Has to be different now with streaming. But with a million older movies and TV shows to choose from, I'm not sure it isn't still true of pay-per-view movies like those. I for instance rarely pay even $1 for a movie.

Median American? Does this include babies and the elderly? Where did this metric originate?

The bigger question is how many people go to the movie theatre (cinema). In 1930s America, about half of people used to go to the cinema on a weekly basis. By the 1950s it was 30%, by 1950 it bottomed out at 10% [0]

Today it's very rare. This is not because of the relative quality of the films, it's because there's more choice.

While most people who go do the cinema occasionally, nowhere near "Everyone" saw Avatar, Top Gun, Endgame, etc. In the UK there were 13 million cinema admissions last July, which would be just 1 in 5 people even if everyone who went only went once, and they only went to see Top Gun.

Same with watching TV. In the 90s about half a given population would watch primetime tv, today it's nearer 1/10th, there's more options to entertain. .

In the UK cinema dropped like a stone in 1955 [1], when ITV started broadcasting.

[0] https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...

[1] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6693/business/cinema-atte...

Every single thing you mentioned is based on existing IP, with the youngest one, Avatar, bring already a decade old, and others multiple decades. We are running on fumes.

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