Alas, Netflix's "Watch Instantly" has become accessible on Mac. Hooray!
I have been waiting for this for a long time. Watch all kinds of things I've been wanting to see at my leisure. No waiting around for movies or bargaining over the queue with my Dad or resulting to the maniacal Blockbuster villain. I am free at last!
However, this advancement has a true downside. Since I begin using the "Watch Instantly" feature I believe I have only completed one film of the dozen or so I have started. Once upon a time one would pay to sit in a crowded theatre and watch a film front to back without interruptions (that is, within the film itself; someone very well could be coughing or something). Now-a-days everything is segmented: television shows with commercial breaks, several remote controls that can switch between all types of media, Tivos, surfing, DVD's that pause, rewind, fast forward, all of that. It is a commonly addressed problem, I'm expressing nothing profound, but it is a viable concern to me, and this experience with "Watch Instantly" has made this problem very real to me.
Without experiencing a work of art in its complete form, can it truly be appreciated? Maybe, but can it thoroughly be appreciated? It doesn't stop at film either. Once upon a time, music was only available live. Then along came records, and now streaming internet radio, iPod's, and a million 30 second commercials sporting abridged covers of late 60's pop songs. Cases can be made for many other mediums of art as well. the possibilities of contemporary technology yields (maybe even encourages) the abbreviation of art.
But, the repercussion that could be truly more dire, if there art is inlined to be curtailed anyways, will the artists start making art that assist the 'surfing' process? Will the trend become short, snappy, flashy art made cheap, made fast... blah blah blah I would need to write more (and better) to effectively flesh out this idea and I always start these blogs way to late.
And as I sat on my lit balcony amifst a foggy 2:30am night, typing away on my cute lil' white computer whom I had affectionately named Marla, a voice called to me from a dark car on the cul-de-sac: "Alex!" And it scared the shit out of me.
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