Historians like to claim that the pre-millennium monoculture is dead. Really, it’s just blurred. Smartphones have fooled us into thinking that we curate what our screens show us. But when so much of the media we consume is presented the same way, no piece of media can stand out. More does not always equal better.
Take HBO Max’s new foray into the short-form space. The streamer is the latest to integrate a tab for vertical videos into its interface, following Netflix, Prime Video and more. Each of these streamers hopes to compete with YouTube (and its successful Shorts tab), Instagram and TikTok to get viewers to spend more time on their platform. And to do it, they’re clipping some flabbergasting selections from their media libraries and pumping them out into vertical videos. Thank goodness we can now watch TV, movies and short-form content the same way. That certainly won’t have any negative impact on our brain function and attention spans.
Out of curiosity, I scrolled through a few vertical videos on HBO Max to see what might pop up. There was a clip from an HGTV show, “Neighborhood Watch,” with unintelligible audio and no discernible context. A clip from a forgotten HBO original film, “Something the Lord Made,” starring Alan Rickman and Mos Def. A bunch of true crime docs. And, finally, a clip from “The Wire.” Clearly, these features aren’t made for discovery; they’re a way to lock users into a doomscroll.
As more streamers adapt this feature, a brand like HBO investing in original short-form vertical content from young filmmakers could stand out. That was once the HBO way, after all: taking a chance on new visions, instead of blowing the cobwebs off old ones. But innovation will remain a hard sell so long as users remain entranced by the big blur, where art becomes media, media becomes content, and content becomes time tossed into the wind.
