NETFLIX AND CHILL

 

As someone who spends most of my free time watching movies, tv shows, and playing video games it is pretty normal for me to occasionally log in to the Netflix App and spend hours scrolling through the content that I would normally find boring or not interesting enough to dive into.

Netflix has been a household name since 2011 but was an unknown brand back then. Nowadays people have known about Netflix for many years, but it wasn’t until 2014 when Netflix started rolling out its TV series which propelled things to the mainstream. By 2018 Netflix had become so successful that there were over 23 million subscribers.

However, over the past few years viewership of media on the streaming service has dropped significantly from 13.6 billion (as of 2019) to 10.4 billion as of 2019 because of its increasing prices. The company plans to raise the minimum subscription price by $1 per month to bring down costs for consumers. It also wants to improve its image with a more diverse female cast and more of what they call “women on screen”. This will be done by hiring women at top positions from media companies such as NBC, Hulu, ABC, Disney, etc. The app has recently begun adding a pop culture section where users can watch TV shows of different genres while some may even get tips from them and others who like film.

In this article, I think we will see how Netflix impacts our lives and affect the way we consume media today. Our brains are very susceptible to new information. Even before all the news sources were available online it was obvious that we could turn over any issue that went wrong in movies or music in seconds on Twitter. What we are now experiencing is similar if not worse where people only have several minutes to absorb the information that is displayed across the screens. When you watch a show for several hours you just forget everything but the images that the characters are seeing, sounds, feeling, emotions, and other parts of the story. You will never know if you were affected by what the show is trying to tell you.

We want to go back to the good old days when we used to sit in front of the television for hours watching tv shows or movies. We used to feel proud knowing we spent several hours sitting in front of the tv and watching TV shows. We felt that being alone but with friends makes you feel happy because life is too short. Then we realized that watching tv shows makes us anxious the same way eating junk food makes us hungry which leads us to binge eat. Instead of spending money buying something we ended up consuming a lot of unhealthy foods that we don’t like and end up becoming obese or suffering from heart disease. In reality, these shows and movie makers should not be making people fat because they have already figured out why obesity exists: high sugar, protein, and fat content. So instead of going to work for an hour, we prefer to watch movies that make us feel better at least momentarily? Is this a problem?

No! People say Netflix affects our minds negatively because we spend so much time scrolling all day and every day on NetFlix. But are those negative effects healthy or do they cause harm to our health? Are those effects long-term or does it only take less than 5 minutes to undo and it doesn’t last? If it takes around five minutes for us to delete Netflix that means if we scroll through 500 pages or 1 page every minute we watch at least 55 minutes of useless stuff on social media. Do we need all that stuff and we are wasting our precious time? Not sure but we might be right and maybe we will be able to create a system or a set of rules or laws that stop people like me from looking around and scrolling endlessly. At least I hope I won’t be one of those people who watch 2-3 hundred movies on Netflix at least once a week (maybe twice a month if I manage to resist).