"By encouraging members to rate every film they've ever seen and forcing them to compile a 'queue'—a neat (and actually patented) list of every DVD they might ever want to watch, ranked in the order they'd like to watch them—Netflix has become one of the world's leading digital storehouses of artistic taste. (The company boasts that its subscribers have submitted over a billion ratings.) It has turned us from a disorganized, nomadic band of hunter-gatherers into an advanced civilization of renters. It has taught us to think of our rental history—all these discrete occasions of media ingestion scattered over the weeks and years—as a single, continuous, cohesive experience. Wedding Crashers is no longer an evening's disposable entertainment but part of a sustained interaction with the culture industry—an entry in your oeuvre as a film-watcher. Laymen suddenly have film histories as well-documented as professional critics."
Sam Anderson in Slate contemplates the pleasures of peaking at friends' Netflix accounts.
1 comment:
Are you on Netflix? We should friend up.
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