In Culture Is Not About Esthetics, Gwern argues that there’s already so much good art from the past that nobody could possibly get through it all. Reading one Hugo or Nebula-winning science fiction novel a week, including the major runner-ups and sequels, would keep you busy for years. And that’s just one small part of one genre! You could do the same thing with movies, television, music, and so on. So why bother taking a chance on new media when you’ve already got more highly regarded older media than you could finish in a lifetime?
I think Gwern’s argument makes sense, but only if the enjoyment you get from the work itself is all that matters. There are at least two other things I value.
One is being able to talk about something with other people. A show that releases weekly gives everyone who watches it a chance to speculate about what’s going to happen next, complain about whatever stupid decision a character made, and so on. People can do the same thing with an old show, of course, but they have to arrange to watch it around the same time. With recent media, that coordination happens automatically: people tend to be paying attention to the same new releases.
And the timing is part of what makes recent media enjoyable in the first place. Consider the Drake-Kendrick rap beef. You can listen to the diss tracks today, but you can’t really experience Kendrick dropping Meet the Grahams less than an hour after Drake dropped Family Matters in the same way people did when it happened.
The other reason is that I want to consume media about the world I actually live in. Take Black Mirror. An eighteenth-century writer could presumably have written excellent speculative fiction, but not an equivalent to Black Mirror, because they didn’t know what smartphones, recommendation algorithms, and modern surveillance looked like. Much of the appeal comes from seeing things that already exist taken to some absurd (or perhaps not so absurd) conclusion.
This seems especially important for satire. You can read satire written hundreds of years ago and enjoy it, but if it’s making fun of an event or person you’ve never heard of, you’ll probably need someone to explain the context. A joke about something happening right now doesn’t have that problem. Sometimes, by the time you’ve learned why an old joke was funny, it no longer is.
I think Gwern is right that, if all you care about is how good the media itself is, you’re probably better off sticking mostly to older works that have already stood the test of time. But that’s not all I care about! I also want to participate in the culture around the media, and to see how people are responding to the world we’re currently living in. Even if a show from three decades ago is “better” than whatever’s airing this week, I might still get more enjoyment out of watching the latter. And if I wait three decades to find out which of today’s shows were actually good, I’ll have missed much of what made watching them now worthwhile.