What impact is COV ID-19 having on our cultural, civilized selves?
In the face of a global pandemic, no one is eager to join a crowd. As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 increases dramatically throughout the United States, the Center for Disease Control has cautioned Americans against public gatherings, and in recent weeks, in a show of circumspection, a number of tours, festivals, arts exhibitions, sporting events and high- profile film releases have been cancelled or otherwise postponed, creating an atmosphere of mild panic and the sense that all of this is going to get worse before it gets better. The more severe the crisis — and the more cautious in our behaviour we are advised to be — the less inclined we will be to leave the house and enjoy things among our fellow man. No matter how terrible the coronavirus ultimately proves, we will almost certainly spend more time at home.
The scale of the cancellations and postponements has been staggering. MGM and Paramount have pushed the new James Bond film No Time to Die back from its April release date until November. Disney has pulled Mulan altogether. Facebook elected to cancel its annual F8 Developers Conference, while Microsoft and Electronic Arts have backed out of the Game Developers Conference, leading to its demise. The NCAA has eradicated its March college basketball games; both the Korea Times Music Festival in Los Angeles and the Tomorrowland Music Festival in France have been called off over concerns, and a slew of major pop stars have axed their planned tours of Asian markets, including Green Day, Mariah Carey, and Avril Lavigne. There are rumours that South By Southwest, which is meant to kick off next week in Austin, will be scrapped at the last minute. There are doubtless more cancellations to come.
Netflix, interestingly, has already pulled out of SXSW, alongside other tech-adjacent companies such as Apple and Amazon. But it’s companies like Netflix that in the face of the pandemic stand the most to gain. As cinemas throughout Asia shut down, and indeed as moviegoers worldwide hesitate to spend 90 minutes in the dark huddled close to a few hundred strangers, it’s to the streaming services that they will turn for entertainment — to the vast troves of online content, readily accessible from home, that have already been drawing people away from the cinema for years. It’s easy to imagine this consequence of international prudence playing out, as everyone avoids the traditional intersections of communal amusement. We will stream music and films and read books and play video games alone, under diligent self- quarantine. We will strive to bypass public experiences entirely. And the companies that facilitate that ambition will benefit a great deal.
Although of course the delays and cancellations that continue to emerge are only temporary setbacks, the repercussions are difficult to predict. Whenever the flow of media production is somehow interrupted, there is a risk of audience attrition, as consumers, suddenly faced with the absence of a reliable source of entertainment, must look elsewhere to get their fix, and can find themselves irrevocably transformed as consumers in the process.
These same kinds of disruptions, meanwhile, can subtly alter the landscape of pop culture itself, as writers, producers, executives, and artists struggle to adjust to volatile circumstances. The Writers Guild of America strike of 2007 completely changed the way that television was produced and watched in North America, bolstering unscripted content such as reality TV and game shows while weakening the influence of prime-time network dramas and sitcoms. As coronavirus fears stall many film and TV productions, there are bound to be commensurate delays on the back end — shows and movies that might otherwise have come out in due course over the next couple of years may be compromised in the process. There’s no telling how far that might span.
While the culture can certainly survive any one delayed blockbuster or cancelled concert tour, the sum effect of an entire season of cancelled and delayed entertainment could be seismic: we could be looking at several months spent consuming popular culture exclusively in the privacy of the home, and the long- term implications of this habit- forming event are worth taking seriously. What will it mean for the year in movies if Cannes doesn’t move ahead in May, or if TIFF is scuppered in September? What will it mean for music if artists can’t get on the road to promote an album, and what will it do to the tech industry if there are no Apple keynotes or tech conferences, if there’s no E3? A film festival, for instance, is also a platform for the sale and promotion of films that, without that platform, might never find an audience. Had Cannes been cancelled last year, it’s doubtful that Parasite would have gone on to be a commercial and critical hit.
We are only glimpsing the beginning of this. It may mean more than we realize.