Pardon the hyperbolic headline. But after lamenting how listening to music was once a meaningful experience for me but has lately become disposable, I started to think about what might exhibit the reverse dynamic. Oddly enough television came to mind. By this I’m referring to content, not broadcast medium.

I remember television always being a seductive time-killer, filled with passable fluff that always promised something better would be next, so stay tuned. Shows started at the same time each week, regardless of what viewers were doing. Often shows would be background for other things, like cooking, cleaning, talking, and procrastinating with homework.

Because a lot happens in a week, you could only remember generally what happened or what was said in last week’s episode. The details didn’t matter much since all story arcs ended roughly where they began and occurred within the single weekly hour. In many cases you could easily miss an episode, or probably even watch a whole season in reverse, and it wouldn’t matter. BJ and The Bear get back in the truck and drive down the highway. Michael Knight and Kitt save the day and then tell the British dude about it. And Mike Sever gets out of trouble and everything is okay again. In other words, the experience of watching television was entirely disposable, a condition reinforced by the medium itself.

While the bulk of what comes across the cable today is both metaphysically toxic and intellectually insulting, things I think are about to change.

Today nearly every show I watch comes from a monthly DVD rental from service like Netflix and Blockbuster. Partly because I am now paying to see these shows, partly because I can now choose what I want to watch rather than settle for what’s on now, and partly because I can now choose when I want to watch; the entire experience of watching tv has changed for me.

Watching is now more of an effort and more of an investment. I have to manage my queue of shows online and decide carefully–its a similar experience to creating a mix tape. Because I’m paying a flat fee, i wan’t to maximize the value I’m getting for my money, which means that I make sure I watch the DVDs I get. I watch closer now. I notice things I never would have before. I sometimes watch 2 or 3 episodes in a row. And sometimes I rewatch episodes. When your viewers connect this close with your content you can’t just serve up the same old steaming coils crap you’ve be pinching out over the past several decades. That stuff just won’t stand up. And you get immediate feedback in the form of no sales and no rentals.

Watching like this really reveals the cynical, manipulative bullshit artists out there in tv-land. For instance 24 seems great on the surface. And for the first couple of episodes it was really good. But when you can watch a bunch of episodes all in a row it’s painfully obvious the writers just made up the story and characters up as they went. Nothing any character does makes any plausible sense (Aristotle pointed out an audience wants plausible impossibilities, not possible implausibilities). 24 simply cannot stand up to the kind of close watching that is not only possible but encouraged by DVD ownership; the kind of close watching people who want to connect with the material will give it. 24 is an entirely hollow and insulting, visceral thrill ride; it is completely and utterly and deservedly disposable.

In addition to quickly revealing such lumps of coal as 24, this new way of watching tv just as quickly reveals the gems. Two of my favourites are Wonderfalls and Firefly. Both are very different from each other and both are little works of pure love and genius—you can feel it immediately and can’t help but connect with the characters their stories, and even perhaps with the storytellers as well. Your time watching these shows feels like time spent hanging out with friends. Each show speaks to you on multiple levels, with an uncommon charm and a wit that takes a bit of time to get. Each reveals themselves only by degrees, and eschews exposition for action. Each makes you care about the characters and feel almost as if you’re there with them. I would even go so far as to say the depth of emotional connection these shows foster with their audience is more like that of a good book than a television program. Gems like these stay with you and keep you coming back—they are anything but disposable.

Of course gems like these also get canceled in their first season as regular broadcast television shows. The old medium, the medium that discourages connection in favour of disposability, suffocates them—and us in the process. I have a lot of hope though; as much hope for the future of tv shows as I have pessimism for popular music. I hope that new ways of watching television will open up new kinds of shows with new levels of quality that are simple incompatible with the old distribution model. I hope that what I’ve seen with Wonderfalls and Firefly is just the beginning.

(However 24-hour cable news networks have achieved the zenith in disposability and make a product so unconsumable that it goes straight from production to disposal without need of a middle-man to consume it. So not all distribution fulfillment innovations yeild positive experiences. But this is another story.)

Ok, so what does this mean for us designers? My examples do again raise the notion that disposable experiences are perhaps easier to monetize than deep connection. They also once again raise the question of balancing consumption acceleration with meaningful connection as the friction between the old and the new increasingly obscures the answer. What kinds of experiential products succeed by offering deep connection as opposed to accelerating consumption? Perhaps the answer is situational and always provisional, and innovations in unlikely areas can dramatically change that answer.

This also points out in interesting phenomenon: innovations in areas designers don’t usually contribute to can naturally and organically enable new kinds of experiences in other areas on a scale explicit experience design simply cannot achieve. So new distribution and fulfillment technologies have enabled a new kind of television watching which demands a new kind of television show, and result in a new kind of experience–all without explicit professional experience design.

PS
Broadcast television’s business model is to produce shows that can last at least 4 years as first run. At that point they have enough episodes to go into syndicated reruns, which is where the real money starts rolling in. Obviously business models constrain both production and consumption. So it will be very interesting to see how both content production and consumption will evolve as DVD, IPTV, on demand, and all-you-can-watch services, change the business model economics of production and hence the experience of consumption.