In Amusing Ourselves to Death 1, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication... See more

When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important.

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 turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity.

The platform’s allure is the infinitude promised by its algorithm. It is the flow, not the content, that is primary.

When I say “everything is turning into television,” what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.

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... See more

In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent.

Perhaps a great deal of television is not meant to absorb our attention, at all, but rather to dab away at it, to soak up tiny droplets of our sensory experience while our focus dances across other screens.