So there’s a new show on Disney that allegedly follows the cast of That’s So Raven some decade after the show itself ended. This isn’t news per se, considering the show launched in July.
This is news to me, however. For some reason, the existence of this show, it’s premiere, any hype and marketing that may have surrounded it, and generally anything about it, managed to come and go completely unnoticed by me. I learned about this by accident; I happened to recognize the characters on a screen in the back of a burrito restaurant. At first I thought I was watching a very old rerun. But I was informed by other members of my party that, no, that’s part of the new show. Didn’t I know about it?
I have been wracking my brain trying to I ever heard anything about this. The closest I can come up with is a very vague recollection of someone making an offhanded remark in passing that such a concept was under consideration. This would have been probably in February or March. Thing is, I don’t actually remember this as a conversation. It’s just as possible that in trying to remember that I must have heard of this at some point, part of my brain has fabricated a vague sense that I must have heard of this at some point.
In retrospect, if I were going to miss something like an entire television series entirely, the chronology makes sense. May through early July, I was buried in schoolwork. I began Project Crimson, which by my count eliminated some half of all advertising that I see at all, in late April. By July, my whirlwind travel schedule had begun. I stayed more or less up to date on the news, because there were plenty of television screens blaring cable news headlines wherever I went, and because when it is likely that I will meet new people, I do make an effort to brush up on current events so as to have all the relevant discussion points of the day, but this really only applies to news headlines.
So it is possible to imagine that this series premiere happened somewhere further down in my news feed, or in a news podcast episode that got downloaded to my phone but never listened to. I find it slightly odd that I was at, of all places, Disney World, and had no exposure whatsoever to the latest Disney show. But then again, their parks tend to focus on the more classic aspects of the Disney culture. And who knows; perhaps they did have posters and adverts up, or were putting them while my back was turned, or whatever. Clearly, it’s possible, because it happened.
Here are my two big problems with this whole fiasco. First, this is something I would have liked to know. I would understand if some story about, say, sports, or celebrity gossip, slipped under my radar in such a way. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV in general, and I don’t really watch anything related to sports of celebrity news. My online news feeds respond to what I engage with, giving me more stories I am likely to digest, and quietly axing pieces that my eyes would otherwise just glide over. Though this makes me uncomfortable, and I have criticized it in the past, I accept this as a price of having my news conveniently aggregated.
Except that here, I honestly would have liked to know that there was a new That’s So Raven series in the pipes. I would wager that I’m actually part of their target audience, which is part of why I’m so surprised that I wasn’t very aware of this. That’s So Raven ran, at least where I lived in Australia, at roughly the opening of when I was old enough to follow and appreciate the slightly more complicated “all ages” programming. And while I wouldn’t rank it as my favorite, its stories did stick with me. Raven’s struggles against racism, sexism, and discrimination, introduced me to these concepts before I had been diagnosed with all of my medical issues and experienced discrimination firsthand. Raven’s father’s quest to build his own small business, and Corey’s dogged, (some might say, relentless) entrepreneurial spirit, inspired me.
Moreover, the spinoff show Corey in the House, while often cringeworthy at the best of times, even more-so than its predecessor, was the first exposure that I had to, if not the structure and dynamics, than at least the imagery and phraseology, of US politics. This, at a time when I was forbidden to watch cable news (all that was on was the war on terror) and many of my schoolmates and their parents would routinely denounce the United States and its President, as the Australian components of coalition forces in the Middle East began to suffer losses. Naturally, as the token American, I was expected to answer for all of my president’s crimes. Having a TV show that gave me a modicum of a clue as to what people were talking about, but that also taught that America and American ideals, while they might not be perfect, were still at least good in an idealistic sense, was immensely comforting.
All of that is to say that I hold some nostalgia for the original series and the stories they told. Now, I have not seen this new show. I don’t know whether how close it is to the original. But I have to imagine that such nostalgia was a factor in the decision to approve this new series, which would suggest that it is aimed at least partly at my demographic. Given that there are trillions of dollars involved in making sure that targeted demographics are aware of the products they ought to consume, and that I haven’t been living particularly under a rock, it seems strange how this passed me by.
Furthermore, if a series of unusual events has caused me to miss this event this time, I am quite sure that I would have picked up on it earlier five years ago. Even three years ago, I would have within a few weeks of launch, seen some advert, or comment, and investigated. In all probability, I would have watched this show from day one, or shortly thereafter. However, the person who I am and my media habits now have diverged so much from the person that I was then that we no longer have this in common. This rattles me. Even though I understand and accept that selves are not so much constant as changing so slowly as to not notice most days, this is still a shock.
Which brings me nicely to my second problem in all of this. This new series, in many respects represents a best case scenario for something that is likely to cross my path. Yes, there are confounding variables at play: I was traveling, I have cut down how much advertising I tolerate, and I had been mostly skimming the headlines. But these aren’t once-in-a blue moon problems. There was a massive, concerted publicity effort, in behalf of one of the largest media and marketing machines on the planet, to promote a story that I would have embraced if it ever came across my radar, while I was at one of their theme parks, and while I was making a conscious effort to pay attention to headlines. And yet I still missed this.
This begs an important, terrifying question: what else have I missed? The fact that I missed this one event, while idly disappointing, will likely not materially impact my life in the foreseeable future. The face that I could have missed it in the first place, on the other hand, shows that there is a very large blind spot in my awareness of current happenings. It is at least large enough to fly an entire TV series through, and probably quite a bit larger.
I am vaguely aware, even as a teenager, that I do not know all things. But I do take some pride in being at least somewhat well informed, and ready to learn. I like to believe that I some grasp on the big picture, and that I have at least some concept of the things that I am not paying attention to; to repeat an earlier example, sports and celebrity news. I can accept that there are plenty of facts and factoids that I do not know, since I am not, despite protestations, a walking encyclopedia, and I recognize that, in our new age of interconnectedness and fractally-nested cultural rabbit holes, that there are plenty of niche interests with which I am not familiar. But this is in my wheelhouse, or at least I would have thought.
It is still possible, and I do still hope, that this is a fluke. But what if it isn’t? What if this is simply one more product of how I currently organize my life, and of how the internet and my means of connectivity fit into that? Suppose this latest scandal is just one more item that I have missed because of the particular filtering strategies I use to avoid being overloaded. If this best-case scenario didn’t get my attention, what are the odds that something without all of these natural advantages will get to me?
How likely is it that I am going to hear about the obscure piece of legislation being voted on today, or the local budget referendum, which both affect me, but not directly or immediately enough that I’m liable to see people marching in the streets or calling me up personally? How often will I hear about the problems facing my old friends in Australia now that I am living on a different continent, in a different time zone, and with a totally different political landscape to contend with.
For all of my fretting, I can’t conceive of a realistic path out of this. The internet is to large and noisy a place to cover all, or even a substantial number of, the bases. More content is uploaded every second than a human could digest in s lifetime. Getting news online requires either committing to one or two sources, or trusting an aggregation service, whether that be a bot like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and the like, or paying a human somewhere along the line to curate stories.
Going old fashioned, as I have heard proposed in a few different places, and sticking to a handful of old-fashioned print newspapers with paid subscriptions and a set number of pages to contend with, is either too broad, and hence has the same problem of relying on the internet at large, or too specific and cut down. TV news tends to fall somewhere between newspapers and social media. And crucially, none of these old fashioned services are good at giving me the news that I require. I want to hear about the scandal in the White House, and the one in my local Town Hall, and hear about the new series based on the one that aired when I was young, and what the World Health Organization says about the outbreak in Hong Kong, without hearing about sports or celebrity gossip, or that scandal in Belgrade that I don’t know enough about to comment on.
Figuring out how to reconcile this discrepancy in a way that satisfies both consumers, and society’s needs for a well informed populace, may well be one of the key challenges of this time in history, especially for my generation. For my part, the best I can figure is that I’m going to have to try and be a little more cognizant of things that might be happening outside of my bubble. This isn’t really a solution, any more than ‘being aware of other drivers’ is a solution for car accidents. Media bubbles are the price of casual participation in current events, and from where I stand today, non-participation is not an option.