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.
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