On the Rarity of Time
31 Jul 2021
If there is one very moment that shaped to the greatest extent the contemporary cultural industry, 23 April, 2005, the day on which the first video on YouTube was uploaded, might not be qualified because YouTube delivers limited multimedia. Not to mention 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, or 2010, when Instagram was introduced to the world. Some might regard the Internet as the most essential invention while understanding the current world, but its importance certainly doesn’t originate from its invention, which dates back to the 1980s. Until the beginning of 21st century, accessing the Internet requires dialling phone number, which deviates from our basic understanding of it nowadays.
That critical moment is 9 January, 2007, the day when iPhone was released. When Steve Jobs described iPhone as a combination of an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator, he also sentenced the conventional form of recreation to death. The name “iPhone” distracts people from its nature: Calling has become one of the least significant functions of mobile phones nowadays. Instead, people use them for gaming, socialising, and accessing multimedia. Such transformation had been implied back to the day on which Steve Jobs, according to himself, reinvented the phone. By putting together the three emphasised elements, he redefined phone, iPod, and Internet communicator for the following decades.
What did recreation look like before the invention of iPhone? Nowadays, many families still place a television in the centre of living room, where various activities take place. Earlier, the space might be occupied by a phonograph or a radio. These devices represent the early idea of modern entertainment: sound, vision, and then multimedia. The scene is so common that anyone could easily imagine such layout of a house, in which living room serves as the space of daily recreation.
The uniqueness of living room no longer exists after the invention of iPhone. The following products, or to be specific, smartphones, enable people to access multimedia sources regardless of space limit. Interestingly, the last few generations of traditional mobile phones were growing smaller, and the invention of iPhone reversed the trend all of a sudden. This is owing to the change on the object of replacement. iPhone overtook the tasks once conducted by televisions, computers, and notebooks. Those entertainments could hardly fascinate anyone on tiny screens of traditional phones.
So far, we could model an approximate idea of how iPhone influenced the world. It redefined, and is still redefining space. Since people no longer choose certain places to enjoy multimedia, we may consider physical constraints eliminated. In other words, entertainment could take place almost everywhere and, therefore, anytime.
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Imagine living without the Internet for a day. Some of us might even unable to contact anyone because, even though phones are still there, we no longer save our friends’ numbers. Other seemingly offline activities would be affected more or less: The books you bought limits your reading options. No bus timetable or Google Map while hanging around. If you wish to make a time-consuming dish, you have no idea how to start because there’s no physical recipe on the shelf.
As our lives inevitably depend on the Internet, it inevitably dominates modern entertainment. Nowadays, most multimedia sources locate online; that is, everyone, more or less, participates in the cloud, either as a producer or a consumer. The distance between the two is shortened online in comparison to traditional entertainment industry; that is, modern entertainment features more interaction between creators and audiences, which used to stand far away from each other.
Such change of the rule was introduced by multimedia platforms, especially YouTube. Those seemingly basic functions, including like, dislike, and comments, empower the audience to directly approach and interact with the centre of multimedia: the artists, the production, and the performance. These elements of entertainment are as if dragged out from a traditional proscenium-arch stage, and the virtual stage above cloud therefore appears inviting. Some audiences, indeed, becomes part of the show: Their comments attract thousands of like, and sometimes people browse clumsy videos on YouTube simply to laugh at these more interesting lines below.
The unique fan culture on the Internet has brought to the audience more than the opportunities to interact with the entertainment industry; it allows everyone to speak. Through comments, reviews, and social media posts, even fans could receive spotlight, which used to be a privilege of creators. Then what’s left to differentiate producers from consumers? It turns out there’s no such thing. Artists might hold more resources, but everyone is capable of voicing out in exactly the same way on the same platform. In other words, if I somehow composed a song identical to one of Coldplay’s unreleased demo, I may upload the work to Spotify and YouTube. Even though a Coldplay song uploaded by me would certainly receive less attention than it deserves, the platform stands there and remains open, for everyone.
The mechanism nourished independent production in terms of music, movies, games, and so on. That’s how mainstream labels declined over the last decade. The market was first carved up by independent labels, then independent creators, and even amateurs. Their fame resulted from the demassification of market. Alan Walker began his career online by posting music to SoundCloud and YouTube, and after signing with a mainstream label, he became a household name in 2015. This was a successful case, though. In 2011, Rebecca Black drew people’s attention with “Friday,” which was criticised as the worst song ever written. Despite the lack of commercial success, Black and the label, ARK Music Factory, certainly received fame (or notoriety) through YouTube.
These examples reveal a problem of modern entertainment: Works no longer become well-known only because they’re outstanding. Sometimes because they appear pathetic. The new rules established on the Internet provide spaces for the survival of tawdry works, most of which wouldn’t have been released under a traditional model of entertainment industry. Indeed, market economy still works. It still eliminates unpopular musicians or bands. However, does market mechanism elevate the quality of multimedia sources?
The answer ends up negatively. Half a century ago, we had Elvis. Later, we enjoyed the Beatles and Michael Jackson. Until a decade ago, super stars such as Lady Gaga still dominated the industry. Who do we have now? Among the most beloved singers or bands, whose works tend to stay equally appreciated even after fifty years?
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Cultural products attract people because they subtly merge the nature of commercial output and aesthetic insight. Although the success of a piece of work often depends on popularity, the continuousness of its popularity tends to reveal its value as a piece of art. Bob Dylan has been active since 1960s. His music and prize-winning lyrics make him, instead of merely a singer-songwriter, a true artist.
The nuance between a singer-songwriter and an artist hints the plight of modern entertainment industry: We’re suffering from the disability to distinguish these two terms. Even though, on Spotify, every creator is addressed as an artist, only few of them create art. How about the rest? They simply produce products, and products have shorter life period. No one would tell their children, “when I was young, this guy made terrible songs.” In contrast, even millennials know the Beatles.
We have to bear in mind that commodity and artwork do not contradict each other from the ends of a spectrum. Instead, they stand as two axes of a coordinate system, on which countless works scatter. In this way, we shall avoid the vagueness while discussing the success or failure of a work, and even its creator.
Everyone is born unequally in terms of talent. Even if everyone may engage in creative processes, only few are capable of mastering the subtle insight that elevates an ordinary work to a piece of art. Over the last decade, the number of new creators increased. But did the amount of new artists grow accordingly? The prompt might appear too large, since countless people participate in the entertainment industry as producers. And this turns out to be the very problem: As audience or consumers, we never run out of choice. On the Internet, behind the screens, there are always unlimited media sources to access. Whenever we finish listening to an album or watching a new video, more of them would have been released. We’re catching up the production of the industry, for we’re running out of time.
Time has become a kind, and perhaps the only sort of rare resource. No matter how much output the industry achieves, its consumers never have enough time to finish everything. Such assertion might appear redundant, as no one was ever given time to explore every fragment of culture. Nevertheless, its significance is highlighted under a modern scenario, as the competition among the creators ends up targeting time. In other words, the success of a piece of work depends on how much time its audience spend. Such model of competition eventually results in the loss of the comprehensive mechanism of evaluation in the market.
To further understand how time has become a target of competition, we may construct a scenario of looking for decent new songs on YouTube. After searching for keywords such as “new song 2021” or “popular songs,” we would be introduced to a series of playlists, each of which takes hours to finish. Then we randomly choose one playlist and get interrupted by the advertisement every 5 or 10 minutes. Throughout the playlist, we could recognise two or three songs because they’re not new, but the covers of classics instead. After finally finishing to the playlist, the only things hovering in our minds include fragments of one or two new songs, the originals of the covers, and the annoying theme song of the advertisement.
Although the scenario doesn’t apply to everyone, it perfectly reveals the problematic business model of the entertainment industry, and even the entire cultural industry: The path between producers and consumers becomes unprecedentedly complicated and tortuous. In light of the blurring boundary between two groups, as well as the complexity of the Internet and streaming platforms, the field of the industry ends up as a labyrinth in which people seek for valuable masterpieces only to encounter works of kitsch.
Decent works still exist, undoubtedly. Nevertheless, they obtain less opportunity to be delivered to the audience. In fact, every creator could find their works harder to be exposed than ever, as more and more competitors in the ecosystem aim for the same target resource. Still, from a macro perspective, the percentage of talented artist particularly decreases along with their declining exposure.
We used to consider the rise of new technologies carrying out convenience and diversity in terms of entertainment. The last decade proved such expectation too optimistic. In front of the growing production of the industry, we suffer from the rarity of time. Puzzled by the overwhelming media, we no longer discover the talented minds. We’re even losing part of the essence of cultural products: their value as an artwork.
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Researchers such as Hubert Léveillé Gauvin unveiled the relation between the rise of streaming music and the transforming song structure. One of the notable changes concerns the duration. The average length of songs is suggested to significantly shorten in the 2010s, and such structural nuance is introduced along with the transformation of business model.
The competition for time contributes to, more or less, all the changes in the process of production, from both textual and contextual aspects. In comparison to last century, more resources are invested on marketing and interaction. Many of the processes that used to be preserved privately to the staff nowadays welcome audiences and even participants. Unlike in many other fields, the reaction of audiences tends to affect the products of the entertainment industry. In other words, the changes on works are often highly associated to popular trends.
How did popular trends eventually contribute to the shortening duration of music? Some might say audiences have become less patient to finish the entire song. Nevertheless, the answer seems way more complex. Streaming platforms redefined popularity by setting up threshold duration for counting valid plays or views. Although the period differs by cases, the regulation triggers producers to attract audiences as early as possible. In other words, those simulating, fancy elements are moved forward to prevent audiences from quitting too early. Such business strategy quantifies how the model of competition concerns time nowadays, and the mechanism, consequentially, has been and is still affecting the pattern of the industry.
In light of this, we may regard the overall alternation as a cycling transformation among every participant in the entertainment industry. Changes in consumer behaviour doesn’t merely originate from those newly established rules; it pushes producers even further on the track of creating provoking multimedia. If everyone is spoiled by stimulation, who would meet the market with simple, slow-paced works?
Ironically, those ignored works are often considered more refined because art never intends to trigger extreme emotion within our minds. Some might argue that artists such as Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga also gave birth to passionate works, but the emotion of their works was meant to complete the works themselves instead of attract more attention in the competing market. We sometimes feel regretful for beloved artists, as they fail to create masterpieces after becoming popular. The phenomenon grows inevitable because the ecosystem of the industry forces them to spend more time and effort on those contextual issues such as advertising and interview, which always distract people from the textual origin of the works.
That’s how multimedia becomes more than multimedia. The fan culture nowadays is no longer based on the works, but how the image of creators is depicted. We may claim, boldly, that both producers and consumers have gotten so lost while suffering from the rarity of time that the entire industry is deviating from the aesthetic goal that generations of artists attempted to approach. From the rise of communication technologies to the universal participation in the industry, we end up entangling our insight in the boundless maze.
Over the last few years, several movies paid tribute to classic bands such as Queen, The Beatles, and Oasis. In Yesterday, Ed Sheeran even uses his own song to bring out the brilliance of “The Long and Winding Road.” Stuck in our time, we should probably look backward to remind ourselves of how works once moved people and how products were once elevated to the level of art. A true masterpiece always shines. However it ages, it refreshes as though merely created yesterday.
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There are always exits in a labyrinth; there are always talented minds in an age. Even if those minds are veiled behind ordinary ones, their intelligence shines. How to discover the talented artists among innumerable creators? The task belongs to every audience. It is not only a must-take lesson, but a responsibility.
Most importantly, we should always bear in mind that obtaining information is a choice, rather than an obligation. The society has spent an entire decade to prove that overwhelming information makes the world opaquer instead of more transparent. And so it goes with multimedia. Recreation shouldn’t be regarded simply as a manner to fill up leisure time. With each click, play, and view, we should realise that we’re acknowledging the value of the work. Only by then is every access meaningful to the artists, the industry, and ourselves.
True masterpieces transcend time. The best works are appealing once released and remain equally enjoyable after years and decades. How would your current playlist appear 50 years later? Repetitive examination would enlighten our insight to the aesthetic nature of those great works, for masterpieces are written to grow old.
The old approaches to works, therefore, never outdates in terms of reaching the core of a work. Media such as theatre, vinyl, and live performance ritualise the action of viewing or listening, which alerts consumers to the fact that they’re spending time on a work that they value more or less. These occasions provide audiences with opportunities to probe into the text. Such experience differs from browsing on the Internet. Even if the Internet seems indispensable nowadays, we shouldn’t ignore that people have created and preserved brilliant pieces of art with the conventional means throughout the last century.
A dramatic scene from Begin Again depicts how talent is perceived through a traditional manner: Dan Mulligan meets Greta James in a bar, appreciating her music after a pure listening experience. The purity refers to the direct approach to the song as a text; that is, without any contextual information, such as arrangement or the songwriter herself. The elimination of these factors brings the nature of the work under the spotlight hier und jetzt, which is rarely practised in modern scenarios.
Less information carries out more insight. The principle probably applies to every field in the modern society. Since mobile devices changed our lifestyle, we have been partially living in the Internet, and part of us have been existing in the form of data. We rely on these technologies so heavily that we almost forget how life without them may look like. But that’s how great works are crafted. We master these technologies only when we exploit them out of free will. Awareness is the key to the freedom of humanity, which nourishes every single masterpiece.
That’s why we shall pause listening. That’s why we shall stop watching. We shall close the tabs and turn off the applications. Movies belong to theatre; music deserves halls and arenas and even mountains. In spite of the rarity, there is always enough time to stop. It always remains as an option, and from the option we see hope in the future of entertainment, recreation, and culture.