Someone I met at Queer Brunch invited me to a viewing party. (I guess I will only know the host; I don't think I know any of their guests.) But even though the focal event is a single eleven-minute cartoon, we're going to make an evening of it with music, themed food, and reviewing favorite episodes.
This kind of party can't happen often because the show doesn't air regularly. We only got a handful of new episodes all throughout 2017. Lately they tend to air in weird little clumps with no apparent rhyme or reason. So of course, the tiny blobs of content are momentous for us superfans, and celebrating it with a gathering of nerds seems like a really fun idea.
It inspired me to think about the importance of rarity with regard to entertainment.
A particular sentiment comes up frequently when I discuss this with my mom: she says in some ways having access to recorded media Ruined Everything. It's not special anymore, she says, now that you don't have to wait for the yearly airing of The Wizard of Oz when you have the dang thing on VHS. Instead of being a special thing that you gather to watch as a family and can't get sick of because it's aired rarely, it gets overplayed and taken for granted, and NOTHING can be special anymore when access is expanded in this way.
And I do understand that point, to some extent. Severely limiting access to something does make it seem more special when it's finally time to enjoy it. It's like a yearly holiday, or a food you can only have at the annual fair, or visits with faraway loved ones with whom you're compelled to squeeze in every drop of focused interaction possible. It just wouldn't feel as exciting or as special if it was something you got to do every day.
But beyond agreeing that rarity does increase the feeling of specialness, I disagree with deliberate scarcity on pretty much every other level.
Yes, because of having entertainment available on recorded media or through streaming/on-demand access, we are no longer forced by circumstance to drop what we're doing and gather as a family (or a group of loved ones) to enjoy something together. But being able to control when, where, and how much we see something is good because then:
- We don't have to sometimes make our lives and schedules revolve around what's on TV.
- We can more easily accommodate emergencies or inconvenient schedules, like not having to leave out Janice because she had tennis practice, or have Jamal miss the family event because they were in the hospital, or have Ramon be forced to choose between staying up too late to watch with his family or going to bed when he should for the big meeting the next day.
- We don't have to lose out for an entire year if we just forgot it was tonight.
- If there's a weather event or technology problem that knocks out power or makes it impossible to access the media while it's being broadcast, this doesn't postpone enjoyment of the media for an entire extra year.
- We can make our special events coincide with the visiting of loved ones who live far away, without the TV programming schedule controlling those dates.
- If someone we know has never seen the piece of media, we can easily introduce them to it.
- If someone we know has certain triggers or is very young, having a copy can allow someone else to first screen it for them watching for content that could cause a problem instead of just taking a chance that the content wouldn't be appropriate for a sensitive viewer.
AND BESIDES ALL THIS, IF WE REALLY WANT TO MAKE IT A STRICTLY YEARLY EVENT, WE CAN STILL DO THAT.
The problem with recognizing that scarcity helps make something special is that scarcity is usually regulated by someone else. YOU can create scarcity yourself on your own terms if you find that it makes experiences more meaningful to you; just like the shirt you only wear for special occasions or the food you only eat as a rare treat, you can avoid overexposure to this media that you want to preserve and just set the exposure to your own liking.
I remember growing up in a time when Internet did not exist, reruns were not very predictable, on-demand cable TV wasn't a thing, and you might have to jump through some pretty weird hoops to program your VCR if you wanted to avoid missing a show you wanted to see. I learned to program a VCR as a teenager because I wanted to see Animaniacs and it invariably started before I got home on the school bus. You had to leave the cable box on the correct channel. You had to make sure a tape was in the VCR and that it was left on. And you had to trust that nobody would mess with it while you weren't home and hope that the power didn't go out or the VCR didn't get unplugged because that would reboot the machine and erase your instructions. Inevitably, once in a while something would mess up and I'd come home expecting and hoping to watch my favorite show and then I couldn't. And there was no way to find out when that episode I missed was going to air again. I spent close to two years trying to capture the last three episodes of that show that I'd never seen.
Oh no, First World Problems, right?
Yeah, I know it's not the end of the world. But neither is the reverse, right? If someone's going to roll their eyes at the difficulties I had trying to watch my favorite TV show when I was a teenager, I can say the same about "so what if your favorite movie no longer seems as sacred to you because access to it was expanded?"
This April 9th, I'm going to watch a new episode of my favorite show right when it releases, and it'll be a big deal, and we're organizing an event around it because that's special. But say I was out of town with a family emergency? Say I was doing a talk in Canada? Say I got sick and couldn't see it? Say I had to work or a person I wanted to watch it with had to work? Say I forgot? Say I sat down to see it and my TV exploded or a storm knocked the power out?
In today's world, if any of those things were the case? I could buy the episode on Amazon or pull it up on Hulu, and GET TO ENJOY IT. If for some reason real-life circumstances prevented me from dropping everything for those specific, particular eleven minutes, I could choose a different eleven minutes that worked better for me.
I appreciate that far more than I would appreciate restrictive, highly regulated access to it that would answer a variety of circumstances with "too bad; you missed it; you won't have another chance for a long time." And you know, for a show like this that's serialized, until you see the episode, you can't watch the next one. If you don't have any other options to watch it unless you caught the premiere, your enjoyment of this thing is interrupted for a long time. That's also not something I think is better than the benefits of making it far more rare, scarce, and inaccessible.
I promise. It's still special. Even though I can see it whenever I want.
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