The question that emptied out

In a flat in Heliopolis, a family of four spends forty minutes choosing something to watch, and then nobody watches it.

Not long ago the question at that hour was simple. What is on? There was an answer, set by a few people somewhere who decided what would be shown at nine o'clock. You watched it or you did not. Your friends watched the same thing, and the next day there was something to talk about.

That question has quietly emptied out. Everything is on. Every series, every film, every song anyone has recorded, nearly every book, available on the small screen in a hand at any hour. Nothing has to be waited for, so nothing is an event.

We have barely started to reckon with what that abundance does to us. When everything is available, being there at the moment it happens matters less. Having seen something gives less standing, because anyone could have. Scarcity, which used to do so much of the work of making a thing feel worth having, has gone missing. And the endless menu turns out to be a reliable route to boredom, and to a hunger for anything that is happening now, with other people, and cannot be replayed.

For anyone making things, this changes more than the channel. The old route to success ran through the gate: get past the few people who decided what was on, and an audience came with it. Now there is no gate and no schedule, and almost everything is equally easy to reach.

Which means the rules that used to decide who gets noticed no longer apply, and nobody has finished writing the ones that replace them.