When Loving Media Became buying media - And why we need to think our way out

There was a time when loving a piece of media meant talking about it. Sitting with it. Questioning it. Pulling it apart for meaning, symbolism, and contradiction. Now, it increasingly means buying it. The shirt, the Funko Pop, the special-edition cup, the themed latte. Loving something has become synonymous with purchasing, yet not understanding it. This shift is no accident. It’s the consequence of a rising anti-intellectualism that tells us thinking too hard ruins the fun, that analysis is pretentious, and that imagination is less valuable than the shopping cart.
Media today is shaped, packaged, and monetized to maximize profit by minimizing interpretation.
In a marketplace where attention is the commodity, the ideal consumer is one who feels deeply but thinks shallowly; sentimental enough to buy, but not critical enough to complicate the narrative and connect it to a world experience deeper than the individual’s perspective. This cultural shift has produced a nation where entire franchises are engineered backwards: not from story to merchandise, but from merchandise to story. And the effect is devastating. We’re losing the thread of literally what the media is for.Fandoms, ironically, should have been one of the last fortresses of counterculture. Communities formed around a shared fascination. These were once grassroots spaces for people whose interests sat outside the mainstream. However, as entertainment corporations recognized the buying power of these communities, fandom became a new market segment. Another profit pipeline. Now, the loudest signal of belonging is purchasing power. Identity is merchandised, community is commodified, and passion is monetized. The tragedy is not that people buy things related to the media they love. The tragedy is that consumption has replaced comprehension. What once encouraged dialogue, disagreement, and creativity now rewards repetition. Easter eggs replace interpretation; nostalgia replaces criticism; aesthetic replaces meaning.
The ability to connect media to the contemporary world — to politics, economics, identity, justice, and inequity - has eroded. Not because we are incapable, but because we are discouraged. A thinking audience is slower to consume. This has manifested into a melting pot of interests that all blur together. This is not because people have become more open-minded, but because their tastes are guided by the same algorithms. To reclaim media, we must reclaim thought. That means encouraging what corporations can never replicate: genuine, in-person community. Conversations where interpretations clash and coexist.
Think: Cafe Conversation that happens every other week at the AFSF. Find yourself in places where thinking is social rather than isolating. We also need to step away from the screen. Not permanently, but long enough to remind ourselves that media isn’t a feed to scroll through but an experience to metabolize. None of this is about rejecting merchandise or villainizing fandoms. It’s about remembering that the power of media lies not in what it sells but in what it sparks. We are thinkers before we are consumers (at least, we should be). Liking something never required a receipt. It needed attention and intention.