BENGALURU : Dear reader, if you were born after 1992, you must know that the consumption of content before your birth was starkly different from today. Back in the days of Doordarshan, the schedule was fixed by the government. There were no exceptions, and newspapers published the daily TV schedule (for both national and regional transmission). Children who were fumbling with multiplication-tables could rattle off broadcast schedules of TV shows. If the child was exceptionally gifted, they could also name the list of advertisements sponsoring the show. There was no choice over what to watch, and the country went about its work quietly.
As the economy opened up in the 1990s, so did the options for entertainment. Our entertainment was no more dictated by babus at the I&B ministry. We went from the rationed three films a week to channels that played movies all day. As the economy opened up, we were exposed to TV shows, music videos, short films, and web series. In no time, we went from a state of scarcity, to a problem of plenty.
If you told me that a career could be made out of telling people what to watch, I’d probably scoff at you and continue my maths homework. And yet, that is what I do today. In fact, we are all freelance recommenders in our daily lives. From one channel for the entire nation (ominously named DD-1), we today consume content on our laptops, phones, and OTT platforms. Somewhere along the line, the question of what to watch went from joy to pressure.
Websites began making lists of films that you MUST watch ‘before you die’. We have all become walking-talking recommenders who keep telling our friends what to watch. And that has given birth to an underground economy – the Recommendation Economy.The Recommendation Economy works when you watch something and ask other people to watch it. However, much like a credit-limit, you could run out of recommendation currency if you overdraft your account.
Your worth depends on the goodwill earned through earlier recommendations. For example, I did not watch Shawshank Redemption (commonly acknowledged as the greatest film ever made), because the friend had also recommended Om Jai Jagdish – a film that shone with the collective talents of Anil Kapoor, Fardeen Khan, and Abhishek Bachchan.
As you earn recommendation points, you move up the ladder in the recommendation economy. Gradually, ‘how’ you recommend something becomes as important as ‘what’ you recommend. The reason I don’t attend parties anymore is because of strangers pouncing at me from the dark with completely unsolicited film and TV recommendations.
Over time, we all walk around with a list of recommendations of books, music and films. At the same time, we also carry a list of works we will NEVER watch, because the recommenders were either too aggressive, or had very little recommendation currency.I wonder what Karl Marx would think of this phenomenon. With all the information of the world at our fingertips, we have successfully managed to organise all art in the world into neat little checklists.
We have taken the only undeniable truth of our lives – death – and merged it with our own personal recommendation lists. Out of curiosity, I looked up Karl Marx on YouTube, and found that his great grandson runs a Youtube channel and uploads parkour videos. Out of respect for the man, I liked, shared and subscribed to his channel. You must check it out before you die!