2017 and the Death of Hype
- Joshua Covell
- Dec 6, 2017
- 5 min read
Around the start of December is when I begin to take stock of which media stood out to me throughout the year. Usually I can point to a handful of movies, shows, and games that made the biggest impression on me, but as I reviewed the list of releases for this year, I found that impressions seemed to be more fleeting than ever.* There were some things that I recalled really enjoying, but none of them stayed with me for more than a week or two. Most came and went in less time. Some of it seemed like such a far off memory that I could have sworn it came out last year, or even earlier.
But why this year in particular?
Let’s consider the impact of—forgive the tired line—the current political climate. In 2017, media, as with the news, flowed forth at a more prolific rate than any year prior. Time has slowed to the point where every day feels like a week. In the same way that you’d have forgotten about the biggest news at breakfast by the time lunch rolled around, by the time you finally finished binging the newest Netflix show, a dozen more had been released. Suddenly, we were buried beneath the sheer amount of material to absorb.
It became impossible to keep up with every piece of entertainment media (and every news report), so consumers of content have simply (or out of necessity) resigned themselves to not keeping up with everything. There is less guilt in people’s voices when they say they haven’t seen whatever the biggest release of the week was. “It’s on my list,” they might say, dismissing the need to experience Stranger Things or Game of Thrones while the larger cultural conversation was going on.
The way we engage with media has also changed. Consumers are less inclined to sit down to watch or play something without distractions, giving it their full, undivided attention. People watch movies at home while scrolling through Twitter on their phones or with a “second screen experience.” They watch television shows on mobile devices, often on the go and in choppy, bite-sized chunks, or they binge shows in one sitting, taking in a season as a whole rather than giving each individual episode time to percolate. Many gamers listen to music or podcasts while playing dialogue-lite games, and a growing number don’t even bother to play the games themselves, instead experiencing them solely through Let’s Plays, where an internet personality plays through the game with some level of obnoxious commentary. Multitasking your media became a given.
People want to have control over what, how, and when they consume. And because of the growing on-demand nature of entertainment, there is less of a chance that everyone is watching or playing the same thing at the same time. One of the casualties of the modern era of technology is the shared cultural experience. The idea behind this disintegration of the mono-culture has been well-covered, so I won’t retread the arguments of more skilled writers, but the essence of the take is that the democratization of the internet laid the groundwork for (a) an unprecedented amount of content and (b) the ability to customize our media exposure to cater to our individual interests, which have led to fewer properties enjoying the kind of viewership that even, say, mid-tier sitcoms averaged before the turn of the new millennium.
So it would make sense that, along with the fading of shared cultural experiences, that the volume of hype for individual media would also get dialed down. Because hype, like experiencing the content itself, requires many consumers to focus their attention on one thing at the same time. And hype is even tougher to pull off, because it needs a sustained period of engagement to make an impact. People need to be tweeting about a movie for a month before its release to be a massive box office success, but studios now would be lucky if they find their work trending for even a day. A show needs buzz when it releases in order to force people to drop whatever dozen series they’re watching in favor of this other show. A game needs continued word of mouth to keep sales from plummeting after that first week. But our attention is getting harder and harder for media to hold on to, especially to serve as companies’ pro bono hype generators.
Amid the flood of content, let’s also consider the more challenging issue of curation. With the increase in quantity, it becomes tougher to identify quality. If people aren’t chatting about the same thing around the water cooler, how can we identify which media is truly essential? So, I find, our personal interest level for individual things drops. We don’t have to invest as much in media because there is simply more of it. If a movie or show or game you are anticipating ends up being a disappointment, you still have a thousand new things to replace it with the next day. Fanboy-ism will eventually become a relic of a time when we had the time and need to champion singular pieces of art.
Which all leads back to my claim—that 2017 has broken the hype machine. When I looked over the things that released this year, not only did the media I experienced not stay with me for very long, but I barely remembered hearing about them from other people. Do I remember seeing more than a few commercials about any of the several superhero blockbusters? Could I even tell you when this year’s Call of Duty came out, and whether or not it was well-received? Is the consensus that Stranger Things was a triumph or a letdown? What about Mother!? Aside from the marketing synergy for the newest Star Wars—you know, the biggest movie property on the planet—have I heard any buzz now that we’re almost a week away from opening weekend? I'm not even sure I could name something that came out in 2017 that the general public thought was "great," rather than "great, if you like that sort of thing."
If I had to put my finger on it, I’d say that it again comes down to—sigh—the current political climate. If we're perpetually anxious about all the things that are going to be thrown at us only tomorrow, how can we muster the energy to get excited for something that won't be out for two more months? Whether we want to admit it or not, we no longer have the luxury of fantasizing about the future, considering it may never come or at least won't look anything like what we're envisioning.
Maybe the fate of the art itself has also befallen the advertising for it. Maybe the a la carte-ing of entertainment also means that we are less likely to see the same promotional material as others. Maybe companies, recognizing the fragmentation of consumer bases, are diversifying their portfolios by targeting smaller niches rather than advertising themselves to the biggest possible audience. Or maybe, marketing as we know it is yet another casualty of the ever-increasing onslaught of entertainment and advancement of technology, with DVRs, ad blocking services, and second, third, and fourth screen experiences making it so that you almost never have to see another unsolicited commercial.
In many ways, I think it’s healthy to derail the hype trains. Fanboy-ism is and has always been a toxic byproduct of consumers becoming too invested in their media of choice. But hype did serve a purpose that I’ve just recently become wistful about: it helped me to know what to get excited for. And considering the amount of stuff out there, I could definitely use that.
*The music industry has been experiencing this for a long, long time. The gash that was made with CD-R/RWs, and whose wound was opened wider still by Napster, was made fatal with the iPod, iTunes, and Spotify.
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