Immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity
Members of my family really like the TV show The Traitors. Like much of modern television it doesn’t really have much in the way of a ‘storyline’ but is rather a series of dramatic events; what situationists would call ‘the spectacle’.
Social media has also turned towards the spectacular in recent years in terms of becoming more like television. In this article, Derek Thompson outlines how companies like Meta openly point out this means they’re not really ‘social media’ companies any more as most of their users are watching videos that aren’t created by anyone they actually know.
Going on to cite Neil Postman, Thompson explains that this turn towards short-form video means that “the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol” in a place where “everything is urgent [but] nothing is truly important.” I’m still taking a break from social media at the moment, and even find regular news sources a bit light on stuff I actually need to know about. So I’m thankful of sites like News Minimalist which do a good job of filtering out gossip and low-quality ‘facts’.
You learn a lot about a company when its back is against the wall. This summer, we learned something important about Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. In an antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission, Meta filed a legal brief on August 6, in which it made a startling claim. Meta cannot possibly be a social media monopoly, Meta said, because it is not really a social media company.
Only a small share of time spent on its social-networking platforms is truly “social” networking—that is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and more than 90 percent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos, the company reported. Most of that time is spent watching content from creators whom the user does not know. From the FTC filing:
Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services—7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook—involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected”—i.e., not from a friend or followed account—and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.
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.
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It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, 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.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. 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, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.
Source: Derek Thompson
Image: John Burn-Murdoch, via source article