It is evident as a kind of motive intrinsic to the vast majority of media and entertainment that it believes it matters, and this entertainment continues to exist for a single correlative reason: as viewers in the audience, we believe that it matters.
But neither of those assertions actually implies that it in itself matters enough to be worth watching, much less valorizing and investing the better part of our nighttime leisure and emotional livelihood in what amounts to noise in a box sustained by corporate profits and the lower instincts of our nameless, faceless, anonymous viewers that are right now sitting away in their nightly armchairs. It is a messy game determined by human emotions and the frivolous, irrational desires of those who have a hankering for their own fulfillment and endless satiety. That is, everyone, myself included.
Maybe we can exempt from this media wasteland the programs that are actually worth a damn. But those are increasingly underfunded, under-watched, disagreed about, heavily nitpicked, then abandoned to the obscurity of time like prom-night babies in the seedy runnels of a back alley. Aesthetic value for its own sake, the kind of purposeless aesthetic production that is the essential precondition of all art and art-making, is the exception to the general rule of the capitalist, materialist, and purposive clockwork of our human economy.
It bears restating one of those heavenly and lip-smacking aphorisms of the essayist-cum-philosopher and pessimist Emil Cioran, whose death in his ninth decade almost refuted his by-now-famous despair that would have augured for him a Hobbesian life that was nasty, brutish, and short: are activity and credulity correlative terms?
If television-watching is an activity, then by God I imagine there is only one answer. And the corollary that barges in like a fat man into a haberdashery? It is humanity, that unwholesome and inescapable blob of a man. But that is a matter for another post.
