So as far as I’m told there are three ways left in which more than a handful of people can survive as workaday writers, they are
- Women’s blogs that cover supermarket checkout topics
- Algorithmic content, creating crappy 20 minute how-to listicles from and for the internet, forever
- Recapping television shows
(Technical writing is still okay if you have a security clearance, everything else is going to India)
Now as an American without a security clearance who is not yet a beloved Hollywood darling and might like to work by writing anyway, that sucks but it’s a lot of other posts.
What I want to raise here (and leave dangling, without much resolution) is that last point, TV recapping. It is now a thing! But I don’t really hear anyone thinking or talking *about* it. Maybe ‘cause it’s not one of those three. Maybe I read the wrong tumblrs.
But isn’t that weird?
That we’ve outsourced TV watching? Moreover that we’ve outsourced TV-watching-for-cultural-fluency-and-status? The business of sitting through an episode, and developing opinions about the action, and the characters, and the writing, and the performances, and rendering those opinions witty?
Maybe it’ll turn out like book reviews were from the '50s-'90s, half way for people to pretend to have consumed esteemed culture they hadn’t, half weird and nonobvious form where for economic reasons all the best essayists pitch all their best ideas pegged to tenuously related (b/h)ooks.
Like how modern blockbusters are stories pegged to tenuously related internationally bankable stars.
And another way to look at it is that just like medical care, or childcare, or cleaning, or sewing, or food preparation, or the ur-example, food production, television watching is a domestic activity we less and less find worthwhile to do ourselves - Baumol’s cost disease cheapening it minute-for-minute and pushing it under the respectable threshhold - yet still find worthwhile enough to Have Done.
And ISN’T THAT WEIRD.
