It's the pictures that got small*

Sometime over the holidays, the two hosts on one of the all-news channels were wittering on about a prize that members of the audience could win that day: a new smartphone/tablet thingy.  They enthused about the connectivity and such, and then one of them raved that "you could easily watch a movie on it".

Well yes, I suppose you could, but why in the name of DW Griffith would you want to?  We live in an age of CGI and Dolby sound and Imax and 3-D (and Imax 3-D) and even 48fps.  Yet a lot of people choose to enjoy the movie experience on a screen the size of a pack of cards, with tiny tinny headphones, rather than on a big screen with a seat-shaking surround sound system.  It's all part of the atomization of popular culture, where nobody wants to be stuck watching something that anyone else is interested in, or at a time other than of their own choosing, even if that means losing 90% of the experience.

The same thing has, of course, been happening to music for many years.  People of my age can remember when ads for music systems boasted about huge speakers with "30 watts RMS per channel".  I never did figure out what that meant, except that your neighbours were probably going to learn all about your tastes in music.  Now most people listen to music in solitary splendour, using headphones.  And the quality of the sound has changed for the worse.  Gone, except for audiophiles,  are the days of the analog vinyl disc, which lost none of the depth and texture of the original recording.  On the way out is the CD, almost as good in terms of quality and much more durable.  Now most music is downloaded in compressed formats, with significant loss of quality. Producers are even optimizing the mix of recordings for headphones rather than for home stereo systems.   People's obsession with never having to risk listening to anyone else's choice of music has meant that they are listening to their own in a greatly diminished form.

I don't want to suggest that bigger is always better in art.  After all, for every Sistine Chapel, there's a Mona Lisa.  (You were amazed by how small it was when you finally got to see it, right?)  But for the first time, people seem to be consciously choosing to consume important art forms -- movies and music -- in a hugely downsized format, just in order to be able to live in their own little cocoon.

But there's hope.  Sales of movie theatre tickets in the US actually rose in 2012 for the first time in a long time, thanks in part to the late-year success of The Hobbit, and the music business is increasingly becoming focused on live shows rather than recordings.  These trends suggest that people are starting to pine for the shared experiences of old, in preference to the isolation that can so easily be created by personal electronics.    Whether that can forestall the complete collapse of a shared culture, only time will tell.

* Line spoken by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard.