Comment by curun1r

> It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.

Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.

I find that I've mostly made up for that part by participating in online discussions.

But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all. Because I don't want participate in the online discussion having seen less than everyone else.

I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far more often than whole seasons at once.

With the recent surge in mindshare around language models and generative AI in general, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is unique content and experiences that are either tailored to the consumer or are at least unique for that person in some way.

But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.

This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.

Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.

Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.

As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.

Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).

> Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.

Outside of dedicated assignments for book clubs and schooling, this has always been the case for literature discussions.

At this point YOU have to watch the content of the people that you want to mingle with. However, the "standard" of shows that you watch is higher (for you, as its more curated for your). Therefore, you do have to struggle with more subpar shows. Not sure what to do with that.

What you describe is and has always been everyday life for me. Finding people with shared interests is pretty rare. Even then, there's usually minimal overlap.

Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to enjoying things alone.

When TV came to American homes in the 1950s, it was a revolution in our national shared consciousness (for better or worse). Obviously there are problems with this - it gives the advertisers and businesses enormous unchecked power to shape society. But we've likely never seen so many people so deeply in sync with the dominant cultural messages.

When streaming became the norm, that dynamic was destroyed. We lurched back to private media consumption (for better or worse). There is no shared cultural narrative to tune into at 8:00 each night. There's millions of disparate voices, screaming into the void 24/7. More freedom and diversity for sure, but nothing coherent you can point to as a culture.

there are definitely still cultural experiences like that around release time. The last of us is huge right now.

You can always watch it with them. Especially if it's great enough to re-watch, or plan to finish watching together (or is old enough to re-watch anyway).