Although I may not have articulated in this way, this bit from from James Marriott’s newsletter this week is one of the reasons why I restarted and continue to work at writing a blog and why I try to post my own stuff, lousy as it may be. It’s a desire to be more of a creator than a consumer.
Everything is television.
In an insightful piece by Derek Thompson, he argues that “a great convergence is happening” in the media. Everything is becoming television. In a recent court case Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook argued that it is not really a social media company at all. People aren’t talking to their friends on social media the way they once did. Increasingly all anyone does on Facebook is watch short videos:
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.
Video is everywhere. TikTok, YouTube and Netflix are video apps, obviously. But so, increasingly, are Reddit and Twitter. Most successful podcasts now broadcast in video as well as audio. Meta and OpenAI recently announced they are rolling out “AI social networks where users can watch endless videos generated by artificial intelligence”.
Most of what people are doing online nowadays is watching videos.
On top of this the experience of using the internet is becoming increasingly passive. Where people once used social media to post their own pictures and interact with friends, it is increasingly the case that the vast majority of content on social media is produced by a tiny minority of influencers for whom posting online is a professional or semi-professional endeavor…Apparently, “94 percent of YouTube views come from 4 percent of videos, and 89 percent of TikTok views come from 5 percent of videos.”
Joseph McBee 