The Insatiable Nature of Streaming
Limitless streaming options are often feeding our limitless desires.
I can distinctly remember walking around in my back yard as I talked to my friend on the phone. It was 2003. Movies were always an aspect of our conversation, so it was natural for him to inform me about this new process of renting movies. Instead of driving to the local Blockbuster, he had joined this online movie rental club called Netflix. I had seen ads for this through the Hotmail account I had, but hadn’t joined. Soon after that conversation, I became part of the club.
I was shocked to hear that Netflix discontinued DVDs in 2023! I thought they had stopped this years ago. It was fun to receive those red envelopes in the mail, but you were really committing to watch a movie if you rented it from Netflix. It involved planning and intentionality - you had to pick it out days/weeks in advance and update your queue or they’d automatically send you one you weren’t necessarily ready to watch. Sometimes the movie would arrive and it was damaged, so you’d have to request a replacement DVD, which took another couple days. Needless to say, it was a process to rent DVDs from Netflix, but it’s a process that’s been eliminated through streaming technology.
If it’s true that our technology is always shaping us, how is the convenience of streaming shaping our hearts?
Prior to streaming, if I wanted to watch a movie, I watched the one I rented from Netflix or Blockbuster or I picked one out from the movies I owned. My options were very limited. According to a quick Google search, there are approximately 250,000 movies available to stream across all platforms. Who knows how accurate this is, but the point is that our children have an insane amount of movies that will feed a heart that longs to consume anything that’s placed before it.
While children today may watch as many hours as we watched growing up, they may actually be consuming more. That is, they watch one movie and then they’re on to the next. Like most children, they watch and re-watch many of the same movies, but the limitless nature of their movie-watching capabilities may be feeding the insatiable nature of fallen human hearts.
Streaming services offer many conveniences I’m grateful for, but most conveniences create expectations. The streaming offerings for our children feed them with limitless expectations. They expect any movie to be always available to them. Just as I talked about the placelessness of younger generations and screens, there’s a limitless aspect to that as well. They don’t have a physical shelf of DVDs with limited options, the sky is literally the limit because of movies streaming from the cloud.
Let’s do two things:
First, tell our children they are limited beings with boundaries. Remind them that they cannot watch whatever they want, whenever they want to.
Second, and more importantly, tell them that no movie will ever leave them fully satisfied. There’s only one cure for their insatiable heart and it isn’t something they can stream.