Technolandy

Day 73 (of 2025/26) on traditions… common memories vs personalized experiences 

The death of Rob Reiner hit me with a sense of memory… his movies really resonated with me a thought about how media influences us in so many ways, and how it influenced us in the past is so much more different than it does now… for good and poor results…

Used to be: sense of commonality – in school we would know we “all” saw Robin Hood on Disneys Sunday Night program as seen on CBC – with our antennae, we essentially got three channels: CBC, CTV, and Knowledge Network – until we got our cable system – then we got to get all the news from Detroit and talk about shows like Night Court et al.

Now it is: fewer senses of commonality – as I laugh at Bruce Springsteens old song “57 Channels (and nothings on)…” There are so many channels (heck, even ones on our system that just rebroadcast single shows over and over again) and streaming services, and niche interests, that nobody ‘has’ to be limited to what they can explore – so while Stranger Things is a key conversation starter for 3 of us in our household… 2 others it means nothing to… and that’s okay.

Is this a loss of commonality?

Used to be: shared timing – Media arrived on someone else’s schedule. Episodes aired once a week, season finales were events, and if you missed it, you missed it. Monday mornings were for collective debriefs: “Did you see that ending?” Even disagreement was shared because we’d all consumed the same thing at roughly the same moment.

Now it is: individualized timing – Everything is on-demand. We binge, pause, abandon, restart. Two people can “watch the same show” months—or years—apart, at wildly different paces. Spoilers become landmines, and conversations start with logistics: “Where are you in it?”before meaning can be made.

Is losing common, shared media experiences a bad thing? What will we talk about around the water cooler… oh wait, what jobs are those??

Used to be: cultural gatekeepers – A small number of networks, studios, and critics decided what rose to the surface. This narrowed voices—but it also created reference points. Even shows you didn’t watch were still part of the cultural air you breathed.

Now it is: algorithmic curation – Discovery is personalized, efficient, and deeply siloed. The algorithm knows what you like—and quietly ensures you keep liking more of the same. We gain representation, niche brilliance, and choice… but we lose accidental exposure to what everyone else is seeing.

While I think there are some ‘must sees’ in the Rob Reiner filmography (difficult to limit to a top 3: Princess Bride, Misery, Spinal Tap) that is MY perspective. And When Harry Met Sally is iconic in many ways and lines… “I’ll have what she’s having” ended a scene that was very uncomfortable watching with parents…

Overall, We have so much content that individuals can nicely curate their own experiences with the luxury of never ‘running out’ of stuff to watch… I do recall a time when there were people aiming to watch ‘everything on YouTube’ when it first started out… ooh, before ads… the golden age of YT…

Maybe there are other traditions that need unpacking as well… saying that mindfully between my birthday and Christmas (what our family celebrates – in diverse manners, some attend it as a religious event, others through a secular lens). But winter concerts in schools… graduation with a parade across the stage… reference letters for jobs (honestly, just phone people – I know I wrote most of my letters – that were then enhanced and signed off by my supervisors… so I assume that’s pretty common….) 

And I love the right vs right argument of ‘was it better then… or now…’  Shared limitations gave us some things, but so has infinite choice… likewise, the old days took away a lot of things that today we take for granted.

Hmmm, maybe we ought to consider the same in schooling as we do with media… after all, so many memories of school are… mixed – the good old days, often ‘weren’t’ and so much of media and memory shares only part of the story.   It’s not about trying to fix something…. As I observed with my “work” on report cards awhile back… it does what it’s designed to do – we can’t make it do the different thing(s) we wish it would.

Video killed the radio star.

Netflix ended blockbuster.

No system is too big to fail…

It’s an exciting time to be in education!