FISCHER: Watching TV 60 seconds at a time

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

I was roaming around the internet the other day and came across somebody asking about “The Terminator.” They had been watching clips of the 1984 sci-fi classic and had questions.

“Watching clips?” What happened to watching the movie?

Is this how the kids are doing things these days? Not watching movies or television, but waiting for somebody to pick out pieces to consumed 30 seconds at a time in whatever order a social media algorithm happens to present them?

Have attention spans grown so short that today’s youth needs their media chopped up and fed to them in bite-sized pieces?

I jest, mostly. Before I get too high up on my horse, I have to admit that I’ve partaken in this behavior myself.

I’ve never watched a full episode of “The Big Bang Theory” or “How I Met Your Mother,” but enough clips from those shows have filtered their way into my Facebook feed that I’ve worked out a general understanding of the characters, their various personality quirks, and their relationships with each other.

It’s weird. Somehow, in the random minutes throughout the day where I’m waiting for something and have nothing better to do than to scroll through videos on my phone, I’ve watched enough short scenes of a show, in no particular order mind you, to get a basic grasp of its several seasons worth of comedic high jinx and relationship drama.

Likewise, I doubt I’ll ever need to do a re-watch of “Friends,” a show I actually did watch back in the day, because all the best bits of it will probably be randomly distributed out on the internet from now until the end of time.

There are even shows that show up often enough in my feed that I recognize them even though I haven’t the foggiest idea of what they’re actually called. Apparently Peter Krause and Gina Torres are in a show where they play first responders. I don’t know what the show is called, though I suppose a quick Google search could easily solve that mystery if I were so inclined. Either way, I feel like I’ve watched enough of it to get an understanding of it.

Is this the new “channel surfing?”

Once upon a time we’d catch a few minutes of a random program in-between commercial breaks. Or we’d catch the tail end of something as we waited for the show we were actually waiting for to start.

In the age of on-demand television, that’s not really a thing anymore. But I guess nature abhors a vacuum so this is the alternative.

Which is, of course, not to say that piecing together a plot 30 seconds at a time is a great way to watch a movie. But it’s not a bad way to get people interested.

Recently, I’ve even started watching “Blacklist,” a show that ended two years ago that I’d never really paid attention to until James Spader started showing up on my feed.

Which, of course, leads to a different issue as the people posting these clips never put the name of the show in the description.

There ought to be a law!

Granted, unless these clips are being posted by their copyright owner they’re probably illegal anyway, but that’s no excuse.

– Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and knows more about the plot of “Young Sheldon” than he ever wanted to.