Everything is Television by Derek Thompson

     I am finishing out my media studies with a couple of essays by Derek Thompson, including “All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men” and “The End of Thinking,” but primarily I was interested in “Everything is Television” which is the basis for this blog post.

     Like everyone in the world since Amusing Ourselves to Death came out, Thompson is heavily influenced by Postman’s work, which is to say that everything becoming television is not good. Thompson very convincingly argues that social media has essentially turned into television. First, he points out that in a filing with the Federal Trade Commission on August 6th, Meta declared that only 7% of time on Instagram and 17% of time on Facebook is spent socializing with friends. The rest is basically spent watching videos. He also showed evidence from the Financial Times about peoples’ self-reported time spent on social media:

Podcasts are also turning into TV, with YouTube being the biggest source of podcasts, and podcasts with a video component out-growing non-video podcasts 20 times over. And then even AI is turning into TV as Meta and OpenAI are trying to get people to watch AI created channels.

     The internet could have been different. In 2008 or so, the internet was still mostly a text-based medium. But today, it is more video-based. The internet has also fractured so that people live in their own little online communities. And today, people most consume media created by “creators” and “influencers” instead of doing actual “social networking” like people used to do on the internet 15+ years ago. The turn to video is making us dumber and the turn away from people we know is making us more isolated. So now American society is funnier and lonelier than before, and while social media did it to us, those companies only followed our preferences.