The power, however, lies in curation. The algorithms want to keep you passive—scrolling, watching, consuming. Popular media at its best is a conversation. It is the water cooler. It is the shared laugh at a reference no one else gets.
In the summer of 2023, a grainy, 15-second clip of a tuna sandwich being sliced diagonally amassed 50 million views on TikTok. That same week, the finale of a HBO series about a rich family fighting over a media empire drew 2.9 million live viewers, while a three-hour video essay about the decline of the Disney Channel sat untouched in millions of "Watch Later" playlists. Euro.Angels.15.Can.Openers.XXX.DVDRip.XviD
We are living in an unprecedented era of . Never before have so many different forms of storytelling—film, television, streaming audio, social video, podcasts, and gaming—competed for the same finite resource: human attention. The power, however, lies in curation
If you watch a political debate on a legacy network, you know it is "news." But if you watch a streamer like HasanAbi react to that debate, while playing a video game, while chatting with 80,000 live viewers—what is that? It is . It is the water cooler