Everything Is Television

This. 1000x This –> Everything Is Television by Derek Thompson

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.

Over the past few years, this has been my general feeling too. I used to love Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, etc. I was excited about Meta’s Threads. But I’ve come back to writing and RSS feeds and email because, yes, I feel like I *want* to like them, but also because everything is video now. It’s too much.

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

I don’t get it. I mean, I do, but also I don’t get the extent of video. Nothing beats video for some art, ideas, and events. But, for everything?

On the upside, the “old” Internet & culture is still around, and, IMO, better than ever – even if it’s not as dominant & popular as video.