The collegiate cultural time lag

It’s 10 p.m. on a Monday night, and I’m just coming back to my dorm from a meeting. I hear my phone beep and get nervous. A text message right now can only mean one thing: One of my friends from back home just saw this week’s episode of “24.” Looking at the text could be dangerous — it might be a spoiler. My friend might want to discuss the end of the episode, assuming that I just saw it, too. And now I’ll have to watch the new episode on Hulu.com tomorrow before I check the text.

In high school, I’d never allow myself to miss an episode of “24.” My friends and I would send each other play-by-play text messages during and after the show, theorizing about the plot twists to come and making fun of all the “24” cliches as they popped up again and again. Over-the-top suspicious stares, Jack Bauer’s tendency to go rogue, generally incompetent decisions by heads at the Counter Terrorist Unit — all the “24” essentials were duly noted in our texts. There was no need for discretion when we’d talk to each other about the show; it could be assumed that everyone was watching Fox for the full hour each Monday night.

Such shared media experiences are not limited to what we watch on television, though. While I was home for winter break, I saw “Avatar” at the local Imax theater. The movie was shamelessly derivative, and I doubt I’ll remember many of the specifics of the plot itself in a few years. But I won’t forget the experience, and by that I don’t mean the fantastic 3-D effects. To walk out of a movie theater with the recognition that what one just saw will change the way movies are made is to be part of a national cultural moment. “Avatar” wasn’t Woodstock, but it was memorable nonetheless. I don’t think watching the movie on a 3-D television months or years after the fact would be the same.

But I haven’t been to a theater to see a big new release since winter break. That’s not to say I haven’t seen any movies at all: My roommates and I have watched “Up” in our common room on DVD at least 10 times since I’ve been back at school. (Seriously, one of my roommates knows the whole script by heart.) Watching the movie in my quad is a shared media experience, but it’s a far more localized one than watching “Avatar” at the same time as the rest of the country. My quad’s appreciation of “Up” in April 2010 is irrelevant to anyone other than regular visitors to our room. To those who saw the movie last year, our jokes about it would seem rather stale. The country has moved on to “Clash of the Titans” and “Date Night,” movies we’re unlikely to see anytime soon.

College changes our relationship with most media. Most of us don’t drive much, so we don’t hear new music on the radio. No big movie theater is within walking distance — the Princeton Garden Theatre’s selection is rather limited — so we don’t have access to many new movies without schlepping to Route 1. Television is available, but it’s hard to plan one’s schedule around a favorite TV show. Of course, we don’t forgo music, movies and television when we come to college. As students in the digital age, we find new ways to make do, and we consume media on our own time. But something is lost when we’re forced to delay our exposure to elements of popular culture. Sure, Hulu allows me to avoid commercials and watch “24” on my own schedule, but I have to endure those text messages from friends who do have time to watch the show live on the nights I’m busy. That may not sound like a big deal, but the meta-game of analyzing the show live by text message as the season unfolded used to be a big part of the program’s appeal to me. I miss it.

Having grown up in the age of cable news and the Internet, I’ve never understood the nostalgia for the days when everyone in the country would watch the big three networks’ nightly newscasts, but I think I get it now. While it’s fantastic that technology affords us such convenience in content consumption, communal simultaneity of exposure to the media is lost when we localize our experiences. The physical and time constraints of college force us to make use of tools like Hulu, but we lose out on some of the fun of popular culture.

The “24” series finale will air on May 24, days after my last exam. Mark my words: I’ll make sure to watch it live, as will all my friends. It just wouldn’t be the same otherwise.

Jacob Reses is a freshman from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.