When you think about it, indulging yourself in a narrative that was created by someone else is and always will be one of the stranger pieces of mental acrobatics you can casually undertake on a daily basis. This is because at it's heart, it's essentially the process of temporarily suppressing one's sense of self by internalizing someone else's internal monologue, of effectively allowing someone to overlay your mind with theirs. Different methods of narrative delivery have their particular strengths and weaknesses and it's important to see that in a time when one particular system is dominant, it has a knock-on effect in terms of how it shapes our society, even if we don't notice it. This is perhaps because we're focused more on the first hand experience at the end result of the process rather than focusing on the boring vagaries of the medium itself. It's a human truth that the quiet campfire experience of immersing yourself in a narrative seems to feel pretty instinctual and totally absorbing. It's like our cute little monkey minds were actually designed from the ground up with a switch that when flicked, shuts off our constant internal commentary and gives us some much need peace and personally I say thank God for that.
As such, it's kind of an easy conceptual leap to say that it is because we all have an intrinsic desire to occasionally put our constantly frantic internal monologues into passive standby mode that since it's popularization, video production has become such a natural focus of our species' cultural interactions. This is because as a format, video improved a simple trick that radio, plays and other live dramas had been silently performing since their invention, the creation of audiences from groups of individuals. When it first arrived and quickly developed into the modern iteration of TV and Cinema, the newfangled technological monstrosity that was video capitalized on the societal progress of radio and transformed an entire generation of individuals into something that had never been seen before, a society as audience . Video, via TV and cinema instantly took full advantage of this apparent mental neutral gear while simultaneously transitioning individual people from being individuals into the collective group state of being an "audience" with a greater speed and with greater success than ever before. This mode of "audience" is socially unique as it allows the propagation of ideas and cultural touchpoints simultaneously to a group en masse while still allowing people to feel that they have an individual identity, or at least that they can have theirs back at the end of the movie.
While in this short-lived temporal state of audiencehood, individuals choose to suspend their regular desire for dialogue or active participation in their own narrative to allow the audience as one slow breathing being to experience this artificial narrative together. This is a substantive difference to it's main narrative competitor, that of reading. This is because unlike watching TV or a film in a cinema, reading allows individuals to remain individuals while experiencing the narrative, they are in control of the time, place and the mode in which they experience it, but the key difference is that reading is performed most effectively in solitude. This allows it to be by design a more active experience, the reader can stop and think and consider on their own without interruption by other readers. With video, you have to just let yourself go for the ride and hope you can keep up.
So from it's earliest days, video was always different, but then again so were pre-internet video and post-internet video.
This is because the kind of video content that was designed for pre-internet film and TV was, by requirement of the realities of the delivery method itself, mentally passive. You could do nothing more than switch your brain to receive and sit back and let the predefined narrative do the rest. You couldn't actively participate or become part of the experience. You couldn't direct the characters or change the artificial reality. This is important because due to the requirements of the technology it takes place in social groups rather than in the minds of individual silent readers. It's important because by setting your brain into neutral and falling into a group you have no social connection to you are accepting a role which does not mirror the realities of being an individual with control of their very own narrative. It begs the question as to what would the effect on society be if the dominant video narrative form allowed you to retain your feeling of active control.
But with regards to the pre-internet period, you can see that watching a video had to be a passive process because a combination of economical realities and limited amounts of screens required that the video be consumable by groups. This is because until the recent explosion of home cinema systems, you could only experience watching a film along with other people in an actual cinema. It's also true that the proliferation of televisions ownership never got to the point where each individual member of the household would always have their own, so the reality is that pre-internet video was produced with the assumption that peoples old be sharing screens. As such, one of the main limitations of pre-internet video was that there was no way of bringing individuals within the audience into control of the narrative without marginalizing the experience of the other members of the audience. The audience had to remain passive watchers rather than active participants. This requirement was a limitation that the content creators has to accept and work with.
This is until the internet changed things be de-coupling video from the audience. It produced a new way of experiencing video, that of the solitary virtual audience member, sitting alone with headphones on, connected to their peers via social meeds but not to be disturbed as they interacted with a screen of their very own. For the first time, individuals could be physically disconnected from other audience members, so there was no need to design content that had to be viewed in groups. This meant that narrative producers were now free to try new narrative forms that try to involve individual audience members in the development of the narrative in a way that wasn't possible pre-internet. Video can now become interactive rather than passive. We are now presented with the possibility of being a member of a new kind of audience, one that is comfortable actively participating, at least in theory, within the development of the narrative itself.
As such, the next few years of internet video will see an increasing number of seemingly strange intersections between different forms of new kinds of participatory video that asks it's audience members to direct it, to participate in it. There will be a number of seemingly avante garde attempts, but also within the mainstream we will start to see a blurring of lines between characters in the narrative and in the audience. You can already see this occurring today within the gaming industry and it's not a hard stretch to say that as this first generation of solitary audience members gain more and more market share, we will see a shift in the mainstream to explore more non-passive forms of narrative delivery to match their expectations. As technology gets better and better, we will begin to see further blurring of the lines of external narrative and internal narrative and we will all become members of an audience of separate yet infinite individuals.
I for one can't wait. Rather inexplicably I always forget to turn my mobile phone off in theaters and it's incredibly embarrassing when it goes off.
