Television

Before moving to my next workplace, I went home for the first time in a while.
Home is very comfortable; I've been able to take it easy.

My hometown is a regional city, not exactly countryside — but Tokyo, where I usually live, is just too convenient and too crowded. Coming back here, I feel relief. That isn't Tokyo being bad; attachment just makes it feel that way.

At home I've been catching up with my mother and watching daytime talk shows I normally don't (my solo apartment has no TV).

Wide shows wear me out almost as soon as I start watching.
There's too much information on the screen itself, and the guests' comments are so incoherent I can't stand it.

Every time I come home I think my mother's cooking is delicious — but with the TV on, meals get a little ruined.
Still, watching TV while eating is her default, so I figured there was no need to turn it off on purpose, and kept chewing away.
This isn't only our house — in many Japanese households, eating while watching TV or lounging in front of it is the default.
Until I left home around eighteen, that was my life too.

My mother was watching TV without looking especially entertained. She's been saying for the last few years that interesting shows have dropped off sharply.
She's right — quiz shows, prank shows, animal shows, endless highlight-fail clips, health shows — even to me that trend is obvious.
I'm from Kansai, where a lot of local programming is fun, and as a kid I used to record favorite shows every day and look forward to watching them. With today's TV, I don't think I'd record much at all.

Focusing on the TV tires me out, so I distracted myself by asking about Mum's life lately.
She seemed well and enjoying herself, and since we hadn't met in a while, topic after topic kept coming.
Even with the TV on, we went back and forth about this and that — and it felt peaceful.

Watching TV again and listening to Mum, I remembered something.
A while back, a friend invited me to a seminar hosted by a TV station and an ad agency.
As I recall, it was about how companies can use TV as a medium for PR.

A speaker said something like: "TV can't convey difficult information. You have to strip information down until anyone can understand it."
Corporate proposals, apparently, tend to pack too much information in.
"So the corporate approach isn't enough — we support you. Here's how a project flows from concept to broadcast as an example of stripping information," with case studies.

Honestly, the whole time I was thinking, what is this talk???
There was a Q&A, so I asked things like:
— After TV strips information down, does that actually produce high-quality content?
— The case of stripping information may be only a case, but from it I didn't feel much added value from the station or agency — is that work really valuable?
The answers just repeated that TV viewers will only watch content stripped to the extreme, and companies often can't meet that.

There may be things they can and can't say, and all kinds of factors on the ground — but at the time I was surprised: so this is how TV stations think.
I remember trudging home wondering what that had all been about. (The sight of attendees lining up for business cards the moment the seminar ended only sharpened the despair.)

TV viewers, the premise goes, like "easy, simple things."
Ironically, more people watch Netflix and YouTube, and the shift away from TV will keep growing. (Though there's also the irony of TV shows illegally uploaded to YouTube racking up big view counts.)
More people not watching TV means TV content (or the experience of watching TV) is positioned as relatively boring.
It may not only be relatively duller — it may be absolutely duller too. (No data; only the shaky n=2 of Mum and me.)

I've written this in a rather high-handed way, but I don't think people in TV are low-level or bad.
In an industry with zero new entrants and little real competition, they don't need to change at the essential level.
Decline is mainly technology rewriting the rules of customer experience. In that context, are they players who can lead tech change? No.

When you forecast growth or decline of a company or industry, talking to people who work there is useful — and this case is clearly decline. (For TV you can tell without talking to insiders.)

I was thinking things like that, eating Mum's cooking, staring at the TV.