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Opinion: The tech effect

'How is Netflix responsible for making me invested in my dad’s favourite sports?'
f1-course-in-monaco-by-vvectors-getty
Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive has been credited with stoking mainstream interest in Formula 1 racing.

 

The spring Sundays of my childhood were usually marked by one of two soundtracks coming from the living room TV: the hushed voices of golf announcers followed by polite applause, or animated British men speaking over the sound of whizzing tires; usually talking gibberish about tigers and irons and greens, or formulas and a shoemaker named Michael going outside, or something like that.

Even if my dad was only watching between trips to the garage or backyard, those Sundays were the only days where the answer to “can we watch something less boring?” was a hard no.

Sometimes I’d stop and try to figure out the appeal, asking questions like “What’s a caddy?” or “So they just drive around in a circle, like, 50 times?”

No, there’s a strategy, my dad would say, trying in vain to explain the importance of pit stops and tire compounds and why the cars looked funny.

I inherited many things from both of my parents—things like my eye colour, my mannerisms, the way I take my coffee; my dad’s taste in music and my mom’s love for animals.

My dad’s interests in the PGA Tour and motor racing are not included on that list.

That is, until March of 2020 rolled around and there were no more episodes of Tiger King left to distract me from the pandemic. Approximately five minutes after pressing play on Drive to Survive, I was hooked—something no amount of Sunday race broadcasts playing in my living room had ever managed to achieve.

It’s debatable how much of the Netflix docu-series is truly reality, but there’s no denying Formula 1 has all the makings of interesting TV. There’s glamour and rivalries and egos and humour and high stakes and underdogs and objectively good-looking drivers, and to cap it all off, the slightest risk one of them could perish in a fiery crash at any moment. It’s a dramatized-but-intimate peek behind the scenes that, to me, makes any controversy or victory happening on the track far more interesting. Turns out they don’t just drive in circles after all.

I’m not the only susceptible viewer to fall victim to the streaming giant’s marketing prowess, or as The New Yorker’s Carrie Battan wrote, the “broken fourth wall between the world of sports and entertainment” Netflix helped pioneer.

According to that 2022 article, Formula 1’s global viewership spiked almost 50 per cent in the three years since the show debuted. Alongside the Austin, Texas Grand Prix that was F1’s sole U.S. stop until 2022, races in Miami and Las Vegas now appear on the schedule. Drive to Survive’s newly-released fifth season is, as I write this, Netflix’s second-most viewed series in Canada.

Both golf and tennis are hoping Netflix will have the same effect on those sports as it did for Formula 1, endearing their athletes to entirely new demographics with the Full Swing and Break Point documentary series that premiered earlier this year. Meanwhile, Drive to Survive producers are reapplying the same successful formula (no pun intended, I swear) to the World Surf League for Apple TV’s Make or Break, which just released a second season.

Hitting the “next episode” button while watching that aforementioned golf series a couple of weeks ago, I thought: “How is Netflix responsible for making me invested in my dad’s favourite sports?”

It wasn’t dissimilar to another realization I was recently confronted with after an entirely-too-long trip down the TikTok rabbit hole. Video after video popping up on my For You Page—an endless stream curated by a “recommendation system that delivers content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user,” as the app describes it—that all had to do with one particular band. I knew who they were; a song of theirs might appear from time to time in one of the daily playlists Spotify’s algorithm curates for me, but that was the extent of my awareness.

Within days, I knew every band member’s full name, about the frontman’s previous struggles with heroin, and most of the words to an album I’m still not even sure if I like—information I learned almost completely against my will.

When it comes to our interests, hobbies, or taste in music and TV shows, why do we like what we like in the first place? Is it nature or nurture? A combination of genetic pre-dispositions and the people or places you grew up around? A result of the personal or social identities we’ve built?

Tough to say, but I’m pretty confident that, like any other aspect of our lives, technology is playing an increasingly significant role. Highly manipulative algorithms can boost a band or a sport’s popularity, but it gets dicey when you apply those same practices to something like politics or conspiracy theories. (Head back to Netflix and pop on The Social Dilemma if you need a refresher on how that works.)

But, like any other aspect of our lives, duality exists. How many great songs would I have never heard if they weren’t served up on a silver platter in the form of a Spotify playlist? How priceless is the memory of the disbelief in my dad’s voice when I asked if he wanted to watch the F1 finals during a visit home last year? It’s something to think about. For now, excuse me while I finish watching season five of Drive To Survive