I Am Clickbait

short story by Elena Lappin

Cagney and Lacey on my TV, 1980s New York, no mobile phones, no internet, cops know their perps and even talk to them, in a fast, emotional sort of way. The two leading women are tough and solid but there is a vulnerable fear bubble inside both of them and the dialogue betrays them. The intro captures random (random??) New Yorkers rushing around in long pre-9/11 Manhattan, will some of them become victims of crime? This would have been a TV drama to watch at a certain time each week, you looked forward to it but you entered that world for less than an hour (with ads), and then retreated into the apparent safety of your own life. Now, I’m streaming it, binge watching episode after episode like a live documentary of that time, as if it were made for this new kind of compulsive consumption. It is not.

Binging: this used to mean eating too much cake or ice cream or leftover pizza. An out of control orgy of some kind. Now it means feeding your brain (or what’s left of it) with endless amounts of content. Content: this used to mean what’s inside something else, like the clothes and shoes packed inside your suitcase. Now it refers to carefully and expensively crafted and produced stories on all levels of sophistication, from zero to very artful and intellectual, and across all media. I can be a happy audience for any of them.

And I am. So right now, as Cagney and Lacey car-chase a man across the Brooklyn Bridge, my TV screen-registering brain keeps binging in the background but its focus is on the casual scattering of devices within my reach. I recline on the sofa, coffee getting too cold too fast, books surround me on the low table next to the cup and on the floor but the iPhone beckons with live windows into pretty much the entire universe. Today, this second, but also, via its own time machine, into any other era. Live.