Endless doses of sugar-coated mindless garbage
Last Sunday was the 40th anniversary of MTV's launch. To give some context for how long ago that was, here is an AARP article commemorating the occasion. I was not quite a teenager at the time though I was squarely in the original demographic — white suburban kids, as media scholar Amanda Ann Klein details in this thread — so it didn't take long for me to become a regular viewer. When MTV suddenly appeared one day while I was flicking through the cable channels bored, I just left it on. Of course, a lot of the videos were terrible — Asia, Styx, and Billy Squier were in heavy rotation — but at least they were brief.
MTV nostalgia usually takes the form of remembering when they used to play music clips instead of reality TV shows. This trope, as Dan McQuade notes here, was even in place by the time of MTV's fifth anniversary, when music-themed sitcoms were starting to fill its broadcast schedule. Usually the nostalgia for "real videos" is taken as an indication that people missed the music, but maybe it's more that they missed short videos, and how they restructured and seemed to disrupt the planned flow of television that Raymond Williams analyzed. Not that they reversed the experience of flow; if anything, early MTV flowed more ferociously. But music itself was mostly incidental to that.
Unlike television programmed to hold attention in half-hour or hourly blocks, MTV elicited something more akin to Linda Stone's idea of "continuous partial attention": You could leave it on in the background and drift in and out of paying attention to it. This made it a sort of low-maintenance parasocial companion. It filled a lot of adolescent time for me, when loneliness felt more acute. But it was also a kind of holding space, a shared point of reference that could organize otherwise unstructured time hanging out with friends (the way things like Twitch streams and Fortnite are often seen today). I remember having aimless phone conversations that were just talking about the videos we were watching, each in our respective family rooms. It wasn't coincidental that a lot of advertising on MTV was for 1-900 chat lines. (Maybe MTV was the metaverse.)
In the 1980s and '90s, it seemed like MTV's main influence was to push media into a more fragmentary style. Narrative was less important to sustain interest than having hit songs on the soundtrack and lots of fast edits and cuts. (Hence movies like Flashdance and Top Gun.) But the fragmentation was still largely contained within the conventional forms that the entertainment industry knew how to profit from: feature-length movies, or 30- or 60-minute TV shows that you could sell ads against. The advent of YouTube pointed toward a refragmentation across the board. It showed how short clips could be made more profitable than conventional programming: Individually tracked users could be kept viewing through algorithmic recommendation, and the specific demographic data that their viewing choices and habits revealed made selling targeted ads easier. The brevity of the clips, meanwhile, allowed media consumption to approach continuousness — pure flow, endless scroll.
It's now simple to re-create an early-MTV-like experience by just letting YouTube autoplay music videos. But TikTok seems like MTV's true heir, combining its early emphasis on short clips with its later discovery of reality TV. You could probably even come to a good understanding of what MTV was then by treating it as proto-TikTok — it was what social video had to be before the affordances of phones and wireless connectivity were in place.
MTV now is apparently a sad, clunky version of "being online" without being online, in that most of the time, as John Gonzalez explains, it airs a show called Ridiculousness, a comedy clip program that leans heavily on TikTokish content. ("When I randomly checked in on the station one weekend in August," Gonzalez reports, "the show ran for more than 36 hours uninterrupted.") I haven't seen MTV in over 30 years, and I tend to think of it as being off the air altogether, just like the Dead Kennedys demanded. But in another sense, it is now just on everywhere, all the time, and nothing's going to stop the flow.
This week, I wrote about museums and phones in "An Accumulation of Nameless Energies," a title I lifted from Don DeLillo's White Noise, in the section about the most photographed barn in America. The "nameless energies," as I see it, are the amalgamation of all the participatory trends and the people participating in them; what the energies produce is a palpable sense of momentum that gives us a vague sense of what it feels like to be distributed online. (Oops, I named them.)
That experience, I argue, is at the core of how people use museums now, as a privileged place for staging those trends and for harnessing that energy. Museums are well-suited to that because many have long been devoted to structuring an idea of "visual interest" that can be abstracted from any specific context and be experienced in what's often presented as a kind of neutral void. (This is not unlike how MTV gravitated toward presenting fragmented visual stimuli.) Visitors are made to feel empowered by being "free" to follow their eyes to what looks interesting.
Social media feeds play on the same bogus sense of empowerment. They also emphasize decontextualized visual interest, or visual interest that derives from the sheer momentum of something's circulation, from the fleeting evidence of its popularity. The irony of "decontextualized visual interest" is that physical spaces are being reshaped to become better conveyors of it — they are being refashioned to be visually distinct in readily recognizable, generic ways. Everything looks the same but different.