Everything is television

Source::article
Everything Is Television - Plain English with Derek Thompson | Podcast on Spotify

main points

TV in this context: endless staan of short or long form video content. The Flow.

Meta is not a social media company, it's a TV production. Trying to compete with TikTok.
Podcasts mostly have their own YouTube show.
Even AI, with sora, is trying to be TV.

Social media is not for connecting with friends anymore. It's for consuming entertaining content. Most things you see on the nets is not from your friends or people you know. They're from people, who made it there committed hobby or even a job. It is not made by everybody.

Ben Thompson calls it the 90/9/1 rule: 90 percent of users consume, 9 percent remix and distribute, and just 1 percent actually create.

Scott Galloway has reported, 94 percent of YouTube views come from 4 percent of videos, and 89 percent of TikTok views come from 5 percent of videos.

Derek found TV to be an "attractor" form of media. The form into which all media tends to evolve.

In his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams wrote that “in all communications systems before [television], the essential items were discrete.” That is, a book is bound and finite, existing on its own terms. A play is performed in a particular theater at a set hour. Williams argued that television shifted culture from discrete and bounded products to a continuous, streaming sequence of images and sounds, which he called “flow.” 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.

Netflix makes its shows to be watched while doing the laundry. They're not supposed to be watched, there just supposed to be there, playing in the background.

Derek says that when everything becomes television, the values of television start to be more important in other domains. Emotional power, immediacy, spectacle, brevity (shortness). Being successful in those things, in TV, is being successful in politics, and in life in general. Trump is a TV star. Every sport athlete. Every celebrity.

When everything is urgent, nothing is important.
Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.

Television is moving us from a literate society to a oral one. The vocabulary is thinning. It's harder to think in broad Abstract concepts. We are effectively shortening our attention spans. The complexity of our thinking shrinks.

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: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television.

my opinions

I never opened a reel section in Insta. I never installed tiktok.