The Traitors & Six Nations: The importance of consensus zones
Or, the positives of constrained viewing.
“Much has been written on the fracturing of culture, dwindling consensus zones—no Friends or Seinfeld to gather around Americans every Thursday evening. For the macroculture, this has long been a challenge, and it will only get worse in the coming years,” writes
in The Three Segments of American Culture.This isn’t an exclusively American phenomenon. The widespread ability to binge-watch without enforced constraints reduces or alters consensus zones.
When programmes such as Tiger King go viral, it’s often discussed in past tense: Have you seen Tiger King?! There’s an implication of a binge having occurred—no room to hypothesise what will happen next week, and you enter the dangerous territory of spoilers.1
Enforced constraints such as with Friends mean there is something to look forward to; it’s the only option. Whereas, having the option to binge-watch can, oftentimes, be too enticing. Do you ever wonder whether you’d have enjoyed a show more if the episodes were released weekly instead?2
Programmes like The Traitors constrain our viewing and leave a vacuum for a consensus zone. People—including strangers—can bond and converse, with the tacit assumption everyone is up to date: discussions can happen without the looming threat of spoilers.
Perhaps consensus zones explain one reason why watching sports is so enticing—whether you tune in live at home, or experience the buzz in the stadium, no one can watch it before or quicker.3
There are whisperings that the free-to-air Six Nations may be one of the growing rugby offerings that will disappear behind a paywall. An analysis by Tim from Eggchasers Rugby suggests that England is already one of the most expensive countries in the world to access rugby.
For many, rugby viewing is limited to the Six Nations and the Rugby World Cup; it’s hard to assign an appropriate monetary value to the inevitable reduction of the consensus zone that would occur if the Six Nations went behind a paywall.
Spending time on LinkedIn and Substack is like delving into two alternate realities; diametrically opposed perspectives. As if the individuals aren’t living in the same universe, it feels more like we inhabit a multiverse.
Several people have highlighted that there’s to be little to no overlap in our respective Venn diagrams: “We’re sharing entirely different mental cognitive/intellectual landscapes now, often” according to
; “I think we’re living through an era of the fragmentation of our reality. . . We live in a world of people that think like us,” states during this Diary Of A CEO episode.The greater a silo becomes between different perspectives, the more disparate and deranged the multiverse will become. The echo chambers will degenerate with less pushback, with each side having a warped interpretation of reality and other viewpoints—as they seem to inhabit different worlds, in some rather real sense.
Within this framing, where we seem to live in a multiverse rather than a universe, as the microculture continues its meteoric rise at the expense of macroculture, perhaps the last remaining aspects of macroculture and its wider consensus zones should be savoured and celebrated.
Perhaps this is particularly important when so much divides us and our perceptions. Something that doesn’t split down party lines or any other division—such as free-to-air sports and widely popular shows with constrained viewing—can act as a release valve to the friction of living in a multiverse; we can, even if briefly, feel more like we inhabit the same universe.
In The Traitors, there are team tasks that both “Traitors” and “Faithful” play. This acts as a release valve. Without these tasks, I expect things would degenerate and end up more like the Netflix Series, Outlast.
Perhaps we should be treated more like children and have constrained viewing imposed on us by our streaming overlords for our benefit. In a time of widespread tension and division, let’s hope the last bastions of consensus zones remain. The tangible and intangible benefits consensus zones can provide shouldn’t be overlooked. Let’s lean into our release valve equivalents.
There’s a special place in hell for those who giveaway spoilers willy-nilly.
Perhaps there’s a lingering regret, like after scoffing a big bag of crisps; you wouldn’t have had 5 individual packets, but the big bag was open and the lack of friction led to an overindulgence. (An increasing number of series released via streaming services are playing around with some form of constrained viewing.)
It never feels the same when catching up on a sports match or a live stream.