teasing the teaser
It bothers me that our collective attention span is so fried to the point that we need to tease teasers for trailers of trailers. An artist teases an era before they come out with the album announcement. What started out as something unique and fun is now industry standard that extends itself to pretty much every media type out there. They can't just drop the season trailer, they need everyone's eyes glued to the debut so they promote it into oblivion, sometimes even revealing too much about the plot in the case of shows or movies.
For me it's a lot less about the spoilers themselves and more about who is spoiling the piece of media and why. I'm okay with the makers showing off their work in a way that appeals to people and gets them to give it a chance, but what I hate is them spending money on trying to make the promo appealing to as many people as possible with as many often outrageous snippets plastered everywhere as obvious rage-bait for one reason or another. Instead of leaving the project itself some space to shine, they just pack the best or most grappling events into the trailer/episode description/whatever out of desperation because this is the only way to craft a niche within the sheer volume of content that is out there competing for our attention.
It really goes weirdly hand in hand with the general cultural phenomenon that many people have nothing more to look forward to or even live for than the next album, movie, game, concert, season drop.
In our private discussion, Ava lamented the marketing of such promotional campaigns and people falling for it, centering their lives around new releases like they are—as the companies contributing to this trend want them to be—monumental life events. We are over-entertained to the point that we derive our whole reason to live from our entertainment as a major driver in keeping us afloat and giving our lives some meaning in the face of worsening alienation from reality. Many seem to be battling so much emptiness that they live off of external events unfolding physically far from them, something that in my view goes hand in hand with the so-called “loneliness epidemic.”
To me, this seems like a side effect of being (collectively) chronically online and at the fingertips of advertisers, easily accessible and always steerable in the direction they choose for us. Surrounded by media at all times, it's natural to base one's whole life around the media release cycle. While endlessly scrolling throughout their day, the chronically online will need a reminder that a project they like is growing by a sequel. Otherwise they'd miss it.
It's not that I don't understand the reason why things are the way they are; I do, I just hate the direction we are heading in.