The Best Thing I Read This Week: Everything is Television

The best thing I read this week was Everything is Television by Derek Thompson, about how modern media consumption is converging toward television-like episodic video.

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television.

Thompson shares three examples of how this transformation is happening across media. He then argues that this shift — where everything becomes television — isn’t good for society at large. Here’s Thompson quoting Robert Putnam:

In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards.

Thompson (and Putnam) argue that television reshapes our values.

Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance.

Scholars have said that the shift from orality to literacy made possible more abstract thinking. As society moves toward an “everything is television” world, we may be reversing that shift — back toward a culture dominated by orality. But what does that mean for intelligence?

When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger.