With the newly dropped mounds of snow that have accumulated,I thought it would be appropriate to explore a collection that has seen extensive use during this  retreat indoors: Netflix.

I think everyone knows about Netflix. You’re either a subscriber or you know a subscriber, if you don’t I have stock in Blockbuster I’d like to sell you.

Netflix is a movie/tv distribution service that moved movie/tv rentals online. Thousands of movies and television shows are available via streaming and snail mail. For my purposes, I’m going to be more interested in the streaming service as this carries the most subscribers (approximately 61 million according to their 2014 year end report).

The movie/tv shows are organized into genres and subgenres detailed and re-detailed here. According to this Atlantic article, there are a total of 76, 897 genre combinations with a relative formula of: region + adjectives + noun genre + based on… + set in… + from the… + about… + for age x to y. A different discussion may focus on the genre labels in movies generally and how that curtails movie possibilities [as in Foucault’s conception of the archive as a “general system of formation and transformation of statements” (Foucault, 130)].

What most interested me when I first started thinking about Netflix as a collection was how their movies and television shows were collected. Netflix is not a historical archive. Its goal is not to create a collection of movies/TV shows that preserve the past or characterize  movie/TV shows as a whole. Its goal is to make money. So how does a collection dictated by the marketplace collect?

Derrida’s notion that “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content” (Derrida, 17) is applicable here not only in the technical sense, but also in the  structure of the marketplace. The consumer structure that allows Netflix to exist also determines the content that is collected.  Movie licenses are chosen in a utilitarian manner. Kissmetric cites Netlfix’s former VP of Product Engineering, John Ciancutti, describing this process as efficient: “efficient here meaning content that will achieve the maximum happiness per dollar spent”. In other words they spend the least amount of money to buy the most appropriate content for the greatest majority of their consumers.

How do they know what their consumers like? Netflix collates copious amounts of data from their consumers’ viewing habits. Check out the Atlantic article cited above and here for more detailed information of Netflix users’ favorite genres (“A Sketch of the American Soul”).

When Netflix first began, they were the only game in town. Licenses were cheap and Netflix had a gigantic collection of movies streaming on their website. When companies like Hulu and Amazon got into the game, things changed. Licenses became more expensive. In order to compete, Netflix put their massive collection of data to work.

They started creating their own content. The Atlantic articles and Kissmetric articles that I’ve cited above both discuss this as a creative enterprise that Netflix saw as necessary to compete in the market. What I see is an archive, a collection, within the marketplace that has started to create itself. It’s now held together by the consumer AND the consumer’s data–an algorithmic conception of the consumer.

This process is democratic. The choices, after all, are made according to the majority of subscriber preferences. New content is created by what is deemed the desire of the majority of consumers. But, what if we imagine this action carried to its extreme? What if the majority of films/TV shows on Netflix were created content?  At what point does the created content become less of a reflection of consumer desire and more of an imposition of the status quo? At what point does a self-created archive reflect values of the past and neglect values of the present? How does this influence the outlook of the consumer?

Of course, no one needs to be a subscriber. You can cancel anytime. But I think the question when related to collections is still valid. I’m thinking here of Greetham, “all conservational decisions are contingent, temporary, and culturally self-referential, even self-lauatory: we want to preserve the best of ourselves for those who follow” (Greetham cited by Manoff, 20). Netflix, in the marketplace, is conserving the majority by creating and re-creating a conception of the majority and slowly effacing movies/TV shows that represent conceptions outside of this majority.

Does this matter? As the preferable medium for visual entertainment slowly moves from cable and TV to the internet, I think it matters a lot. This is what people will be watching in the future. We should ask how this creation of content will influence movies/TV shows and, more importantly, the people who watch.