Summary
Everything is turning into television: endless short videos made by strangers, streamed like TV. Podcasts, social apps, and even AI feed this flow. That shift weakens solitude, deep attention, and meaningful thought.
Highlights
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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.
Las redes sociales se transformaron en televisión. Probablemente porque es la forma más efectiva y eficiente de captura atencional y porque el giro de estas plataformas nunca fue conectar a la gente entre sí.
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the 90/9/1 rule: 90 percent of users consume, 9 percent remix and distribute, and just 1 percent actually create. In fact, as 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 video
A propósito de la composición de la participación en Redes Sociales. Buen concepto. Muy relacionado con la power law distribution, de la cual es probablemente una instanciación.
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Among Netflix’s 36,000 micro-genres, one is literally called “casual viewing.” The label is reportedly reserved for sitcoms, soap operas, or movies that, as the Hollywood Reporter recently described the 2024 Jennifer Lopez film Atlas, are “made to half-watch while doing laundry.” Critics who actually watch a great deal of streaming television for the purpose of appraising it these days are somewhat like children staring directly at the sun. You’re not supposed to watch it! The whole point is that it’s supposed to just be there, glowing, while you do something else.
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Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today’s youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”
Los jóvenes quieren ser influencers.
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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. I don’t have the answers here. But we should figure it out soon. The marble is still spinning, but it is reaching the bottom of the bowl.
A propósito del efecto de nuestros nichos digitales en nuestras subjetividades. La inhibición de la interioridad… quizás a esto es lo que apunta Maryanne Wolf con “the shallows”?