You Don't Consume Media, You Experience it

I feel like this might be a problem of language or something, like it's got to do with my own specific and slightly neurotic ideas about the words we use.

But there's something just kind of… Weird to me about describing media as something we "consume". Consumption is a mechanism for growth, and I think that we can be said to "consume" media in that way.

But what trips me up is the sense that when we consume something we are removing it somehow, or otherwise changing its nature so much that it is unrecognizable. With media, I can't take away a movie just by watching it; it can be rewatched endlessly, so long as there's electricity and a functional system.

But we don't talk about movies and music as "consuming electricity" or "consuming computer parts". We talk about it as "consuming media," and it irks me.

Probably it is a holdover from when media was physical (when it, you know, had an actual medium) and you really could "run out" of records or reels. But now that we can have a functionally infinite amount or copies for a given item, it seems like it's speaking to something that doesn't exist.

I think it holds us back, creating a sense of artificial scarcity that people are finding (ever creative) ways to exploit, and ultimately doing something of a disservice to creative projects.