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 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 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.

Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.

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.

But digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation.

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