Spoilt For Choice

I never did get around to using Napster back in its heyday, although I did use something called Audiogalaxy, a broadly similar sort of thing, for a while – until my (by today’s standard miniscule 3GB) HD was filled up with songs. This short period of almost anarchic free downloading happened to coincide with a time when I was feeling a bit nostalgic for my long-lost youth and I ended up downloading all the tunes I could remember from when rock music used to really matter to me.

Of course, once I’d downloaded them I realised just why I hadn’t played or heard so many of them in such a long time. Putting to one side the atrocious audio quality of the MP3 format, especially in the low bit-rates preferred by such downloaders, I realised that few of the tracks ever lived up to my rose-tinted memories of them.

I found myself constantly skipping through the tracks, after as little as a few seconds or as much as a minute or so, vainly searching for that one song that would again mean as much to me as it once did. Eventually I gave up on the search and, a few weeks or so later, deleted them all.

More interestingly though, while I had them I found I was both paralysed and – at the same time – made impatient by the amount of choice I had. For, back in those old younger days when I had a limited budget, I could only afford a handful of singles or a couple of albums a month. Often, therefore, I had to work – sometimes quite hard – to make myself like my purchases enough to justify to myself (let alone my often disparaging mates) why I had paid good money for them.

Nowadays, I find the same applies in the multi-channel TV universe where the multiplicity of choice can be just as frustrating, and – in a seemingly perverse way limiting. This morning I came across this:

The explosion of choice in past decades has conclusively demonstrated that competition brings you more of absolutely everything, including public service content: more news, more reality, more arts, more game shows, more documentaries, more cookery, more quizzes, more sport, more films and so on.

This Financial Times article, written by Martin Le Jeune, who, I discovered at the end of it, ‘is a former head of public affairs for BSkyB’. So, his bias should be fairly obvious. The trouble is that this ‘explosion of choice’ has been no such thing. The more new TV channels appear the worse the rest of it gets.

What we do have instead is:

• Instant gratification. We seem to have less patience now there is always an easier alternative just a click of the mouse or of the remote away.
• Programmes made shallower to get wider appeal. Programmes like Horizon, The Money Programme, Panorama for example are pale shadows of their original selves, whereas serious documentary and current affairs programmes on the commercial channels have more or less disappeared.
• The current seeming obsession with ‘celebrities’ and their ever-tedious doings. However, this obsession is not much to do with their (obvious lack of any discernable) talents, more that their names and foibles have become a sort of common currency, even a lingua franca, around which ‘ordinary people’ can communicate. This could easily explain why celebrities have become so famous for no apparent reason; they are common ground where people these days have such individualistic and individual lifestyles.
• The new style programmes such as Hustle, Spooks and so on, have become more like American TV - more about surface rather than substance, just empty eye-candy.

· Old classic TV programmes – for example – are rarely as good as nostalgia remembers them to be, but I do find things like Minder, The Professionals, The Sweeny for example, currently re-running on ITV4, to be far more watchable than what the main channels are offering.

• Just as with having a shed load of songs on the computer, the fact of having so many TV channels, even things like web sites and so forth for that matter, often means it is easier to chose none rather than one.
• A report on how the ease of acquiring porn on the net has changed youngsters attitude and expectations towards sex may not initially seem to have much in common with my theme, but this too shows that too much ‘choice’ even here can have some negative effects.

I never got time to use much of what I'd downloaded anyway. Instead, it almost turned into a sort of obsessive collector type thing, rather than anything useful. There is a tendency to get things just because you can, because they are there, for the sake of some notion of completeness, rather for any other reason, such as any intrinsic worth.

It gets very hard to resist the amount of choice. There is the knowledge that out there, somewhere, there will be something you have not got… yet. A remoter possibility that there is something out there you’ve always wanted, something you feel you’ve always lacked. More likely though it will be something you once had a vague, passing interest in, but it will be something that makes the – nowadays minimal - effort of getting it seem worthwhile.

In a way, it is like the advertising promise - the promise that this one material good, this particular thing will bring salvation; it will cure all your wants, needs and assuage all your fears and insecurities. It will make you whole again. There is, though, the implicit corollary, that without it you are somehow incomplete, that you are not the whole person you like to believe you are. That you can never be someone - or even anyone - until you own this thing. You know it is all nonsense, and yet you still desire. You still want this stuff even though you know deep down that want is not a need and the thing itself will not fill that hole that advertising tells you is there.

If you have read this far then you will be expecting an answer, something neat and tidy to sum it all up.

Well, here it is.

The answer is not that choice is wrong, rather that you must make sure you are choosing the right thing. Not choosing between the promises held up by competing brands because one appeals to some aspiration of yours, but choosing because it is the one you really, truly, like the taste of or whatever, no matter what the advertising promises. That you know the only real choice with modern TV is whether it is turned on or off. All the programmes are virtually the same variations on a few done-to-death themes. So, turn it off and read a book instead. Rather than trying in vain to recapture your lost youth through a vain search through the back catalogue of the soundtrack of your memory, try a little grown up music instead and get some depth into your life.