Into Video? Say Howdy to Loneliness and Shallow Thinking
October 21, 2025
This will surely improve the state of the world and validate Newton Minnow’s observation about a vast wasteland.. Or at least distract from it. On his Substack, Deric Thompson declares “Everything Is Television.” Thompson supports his assertion with three examples: First, he notes, Facebook and Instagram users now spend over 90% and 80% of their time on the platforms, respectively, watching videos. Next, he laments, most podcasts now include video. What started as a way to listen to something interesting as we performed other tasks has become another reason to stare at a screen. Finally, the post reports to our horror, both Meta and OpenAI have just launched products that serve up endless streams of AI-generated videos. Just what we needed.
Thompson’s definition of television here includes every venue hosting continuous flows of episodic video. This is different from entertainment forms that predate television—plays, books, concerts, etc.—because those were finite experiences. Now we can zone out to video content for hours at a time. And, apparently, more and more of us do. In a section titled “Lonely, Mean, and Dumb,” Thompson describes why this is problematic. He writes:
“My beef is not with the entire medium of moving images. My concern is what happens when the grammar of television rather suddenly conquers the entire media landscape. In the last few weeks, I have been writing a lot about two big trends in American life that do not necessarily overlap. My work on the ‘Antisocial Century’ traces the rise of solitude in American life and its effects on economics, politics, and society. My work on ‘the end of thinking’ follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these trends is exclusively caused by the logic of television colonizing all media. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it.”
On the issue of solitude, the post cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. That work correlates the growing time folks spent watching TV from 1965 – 1995 with a marked decrease in activities involving other people. Volunteering and dinner parties are a couple of examples. So what happens when the Internet, social media, and AI turbocharge that self-isolation trend? Thompson asserts:
“When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. 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 is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, [Neil] Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.”
Well said. For anyone with enough attention span to have read this far, see the write-up for more in-depth consideration of these issues. Is the human race forfeiting its capacity to think deeply and critically about complex topics? Is it too late to reverse the trend?
Cynthia Murrell, October 21, 2025
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