Let us, for the moment, accept the claims that there is a good deal of hate-watching out there (by which I mean really watching things they hate, rather than just saying they do).
Alas, even as the relevant media analysts insist that more people are doing so, they are fuzzy on who is doing so--all as it seems plausible that not everyone does so equally. (Certainly I don't bother with hate-watching. My personal response to seeing something I don't like is to simply change the channel or terminate the stream--if I have even made the mistake of bothering to turn on something I end up hating in the first place--and I find that I get more and more inclined to do this all the time.)
Might it be that hate-watching is something we see more among, for example, college graduates of the coastal cities of middlebrow attitudes and the people who imitate them, with all the addiction to elitism and snobbery and irony (I refrain here from using stronger words) that goes with that?
It doesn't seem implausible.
Alternatively might it be that hate-watching is something we see more among those demographics which may not like the ways in which television has changed in recent decades? For example, the shift away from casual and easy viewing to insanely overpraised Midcult pretension? Or who dislike the way the ever more pervasive and strident status politics of our time seem ever more constantly manifest in what is supposed to be the entertainment to which people look to take their minds off their troubles and relax? (I certainly suspect that what I have said about TV commercials carries over to TV more broadly, and it is undeniable that a lot of people are not loving it.) Could it be that rather than, for example, taking refuge in the more pleasing TV of a past era, at least for some of the time, they prefer to bash the present?
That doesn't seem implausible either. And it all seems to me to be worth a bit of consideration from those who study such things.
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