# Everything Is Television ![rw-book-cover](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XE9X!,w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F707c7327-31a7-4ed2-ab2d-af440e3b45ea_878x861.jpeg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Substack]] - Full Title: Everything Is Television - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Media of all kinds are becoming nonstop streams of short videos like television. Algorithms push unknown creators' clips, turning podcasts, social apps, and even AI into TV. This shift favors distraction, spectacle, and shallow attention over solitude and deep thought. - URL: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > 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. 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. You might even say that much television is not even made to be watched at all. It is made to flow. The play button is the point. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k77zpg4ch54a25ar02faf0ff)) > By Williams’s definition, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are an even more perfect expression of television than old-fashioned television, itself. On NBC or HBO, one might tune in to watch a show that feels particular and essential. On TikTok, by contrast, nothing is essential. Any one piece of content on TikTok is incidental, even inessential. The platform’s allure is the infinitude promised by its algorithm. It is the flow, not the content, that is primary. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k78173w2ym3tkka0kks2yrbc)) > When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence ([although that seems to be going, too](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-end-of-thinking)) 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k781dzjxrtky81nqemctp5rc)) > A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k77y01m188v2p957dkknm9w3)) > Whether the starting point is a student directory (Facebook), radio, or an AI image generator, the end point seems to be the same: a river of short-form video. In mathematics, the word “attractor” describes a state toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve. To take a classic example: Drop a marble into a bowl, and it will trace several loops around the bowl’s curves before settling to rest at the bottom. In the same way, water draining in a sink will ultimately form a spiral pattern around the drain. Complex systems often settle into recurring forms, if you give them enough time. Television seems to be the attractor of all media. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k77zkreg0hvs3vzpaf5kcpd0)) > *Amusing Ourselves to Death*[1](https://substack.com/home/post/p-175648601#footnote-1-175648601), 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.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k78194p6tw144ecwkxps4mgp))