If you want to enjoy the best of popular media without feeling chained to your screen, try these three rules:
The smartphone, combined with 4G and now 5G LTE, was the final jailbreak. With Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok, the concept of "owning" media gave way to "accessing" media. The cloud became the ultimate server. Today, popular media flows through a faucet that never runs dry.
The commute begins. Earbuds slide into place. Thumbs hover over a glowing screen. In the span of a single generation, the “dead time” of life—waiting in line, riding the subway, sitting in a doctor’s office—has been transmuted into a prime venue for media consumption. The shift from the communal, fixed-location viewing of the 20th century (the family television, the movie palace) to the atomized, on-the-go engagement of the 21st is not merely a technological upgrade. It is a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between popular media and the self. Portable entertainment content has not just changed when and where we consume stories; it has changed the very shape of those stories, the economics of their production, and the psychological nature of our engagement with them. We now carry a mirror to our desires in our pockets, and we have grown accustomed to looking at it every waking moment.