Ep. 382: Is the Internet Becoming Television?

Back in October, the journalist Derek Thompson published an intriguing essay on his Substack that was titled Everything is Television. Now it created a bit of a stir among those who study technology and the Internet for a living. Here's Derek, actually, in his own words summarizing the thesis of this article. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. So what did Derek mean by this? This is the question we're gonna answer today. I'm gonna both unpack and expand on Thompson's arguments and then add my own conclusions, including three predictions about what I think is gonna happen next. Hopefully, by the end of our discussion, you'll have a brand new way of understanding the sort of vaguely distressing but difficult to define changes that seem to have been happening in Internet culture in recent years and have some ideas about what to expect and what to do to best react to the future. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, is the Internet becoming television, and what does this mean for you? Alright. So I wanna start by really diving into the big points from Derek Thompson's articles to see if we can make sense of what he's saying here. Fortunately, on a recent episode of Thompson's podcast, Plain English, which is really good and you should listen to it, especially the episodes where I've been a guest, Thompson read his piece out loud. So we can actually, hear passages from his article read in his own voice. Alright. So I wanna go back, and I wanna replay that that initial clip because this is where, Thompson started his article. So, Jesse, let's hear that original clip again. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. He then goes on in the article to immediately give three examples of what he meant by that claim. Alright. Example number one, the death of social media. Thompson references a brief that was filed last August by, Meta as part of the antitrust trial that the FTC brought against it. In the brief that is publicly available now, Meta made what Thompson described as a startling claim, which was the fact that their social networks, namely Facebook and Instagram, really aren't that social anymore. Let me give you a couple statistics from that brief. More than 80% of time spent on Facebook, they revealed, and more than 90% of time spent on Instagram is now dedicated to watching videos, most of them being videos created by people who the users do not directly know. So he's noting social media is now less about socializing and more about watching content from people you don't know, like you would do on television. Over at the Financial Times, John Byrne Murdoch, as you know, he does so well, has some nice data visualizations that capture …