I really didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I was probably too busy playing basketball at school and working at home to help our family make ends meet on our small country mini-farm to spend much time grappling with the vastness of the future. The present was just too full of its own life for long stints of navel gazing.
But I still had my moments of what I’ll call forward reflection, and I did consider at least a few career paths. I wanted to be a graphic designer, mostly. (A much more difficult job to land back before the advent of the Apple computer.) I wanted to be either an English teacher or a long-haul trucker for a while. And, of course, the idea of being an astronaut blasted up to the top slot on my life-plan chart from time to time. (How could it not for a guy born in 1969, the very year we first landed on the moon?)
Never even once, I can assure you, did I think, You know, I think I want to watch TV for a living. How would I have even known such a career path existed back in the 1970s and ’80, before TV was even invented? Odd, then, that I ended up at Plugged In, where for years I handled our TV review beat … and quite literally watched TV for a living!
But it’s one thing to grapple with TV for the purposes of critical analysis (a review), and quite another to watch it as a tagger. What’s a tagger? Well, as Time’s Laura Stampler notes, “There are those who binge watch to avoid work, and then there are the lucky few who binge watch for work.” She reports that Netflix recently posted a job opening in the U.K. for someone who would watch gross quantities of TV shows and movies and then “tag” them with genres. Once tagged, the shows and flicks are more adaptable to Netflix’s goal of helping subscribers find the things they want to watch … even before they know what they want to watch.
So I guess you could say that a Plugged In TV reviewer watches stuff so you don’t have to, and a Netflix tagger watches it so that you can.
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