I think people confuse 'watching passively' with 'watching lazily' — I've had some of the deepest, most obsessive conversations about film and TV since streaming, because now my friends have actually seen the same things I have. The shared access created the community, and that community pushed me to watch harder, not less.
There's real data showing that niche and classic film viewership has skyrocketed since streaming took off, so the premise here is just factually shaky. Scarcity never made audiences more sophisticated, it just made access unequal.
Effort of seeking out great art? My grandmother couldn't access opera, independent cinema, or world music because she lived in a rural town with one movie theater. Streaming democratized culture in a way that's actually emotional to think about — the idea that only people who could physically reach great art deserved to appreciate it is honestly kind of gross.
The algorithm rabbit hole has genuinely introduced me to directors I never would have stumbled across otherwise — Agnès Varda, Fassbinder, early Cronenberg. If anything I'm a more curious viewer now than when I was 'working hard' to find stuff at Blockbuster, which mostly just meant I rented the same action movies over and over.
This is such a gatekeeping take — acting like struggling to find a VHS or driving to a niche video store made you a more enlightened viewer is pure nostalgia bias. Streaming literally put the entire Criterion Collection in my living room, and I've watched more challenging foreign films in the last two years than in my entire life before that.
It genuinely breaks my heart that my younger cousins have access to the entire history of cinema and they just... don't care, because nothing feels rare or hard-won to them. Abundance killed the hunger.
Studies on attention span aren't just about TikTok — people are increasingly abandoning films and shows 20 minutes in because the cost of quitting is zero. When you paid $15 for a ticket and traveled to an art house cinema, you sat with discomfort and sometimes got something profound out of it.
I used to haunt the foreign section of my local video store and those recommendations from the weird clerk shaped my entire taste in film. Now my algorithm just feeds me more of what I already half-liked, and honestly my horizons have shrunk embarrassingly.
When everything is equally one click away, nothing feels special — that's just basic psychology. The friction of seeking something out is part of what teaches you to value it.
There's something that genuinely changes in your brain when you've spent three weeks tracking down a foreign film — you watch it differently, you're *invested* before it even starts. Now I just scroll for 20 minutes and settle for whatever's trending, and I barely remember what I watched by Tuesday.