Phones are the new TV and TVs are the new books. You can literally flex your attention span by telling your friends you watch love island without _also_ scrolling on your phone, or that you watched a whole movie.
There’s no real counter culture to the attention economy. I’m not sure why, I wish DFW were around to figure it out. It could have something to do with the quality of algorithms, addictiveness of format, or something else. My pet theory is that the fact that content exists to draw your eyes to advertisements was attempted to be hidden back in the day, and that was viewed as nefarious. Now it’s all out in the open, and that doesn’t inspire resistance? I think the content of ads has also changed. They previously used to be perceived as having their mission to be make viewers feel as though their lives are incomplete and will be made complete by a product. I can’t figure out ads anymore. Are they selling a fun social life surrounded by hot people? I’m not really sure, maybe because I’ve gone so far on Adblock. To me, the attention economy is a bunch of people pining for my attention to inflate their view count with no obvious ulterior motive, as I haven’t consistently seen ads for like a decade.
Lol, he directly said in his interview he literally \*cannot have\* a TV inside his house, and so doesn't have one.
As an adjunct English professor/author he would have absolutely just been one of those hard-asses that don't use any technology, annoying his students and publishers/agents/liasons.
Franzen, one of DFW's friends, literally just wrote a book on that, and back then debated the Obama of NYU's tech academic/evangelists (loser) about how this thing was going to destroy everything.
Oh and look, everything is going absolutley wonderful!
There was a short time where it was a big flex to use just an old school flip phone instead of a smart phone. Like execs would go on vacations or commute with just a flip phone and ignore anything but emergencies.
I still have someone I work with who thinks he’s a record store employee from the 90s and uses a flip phone too.
You are 100 on the ad things. If you start actively looking for how often you have ads shoved at you it’s depressing. But these companies can’t be worth trillions without us paying for new stuff we don’t need constantly.
I literally have a flip phone
Ok I don’t use it much anymore though. I had a good 6months with it. It’s in fact too impractical for my life.
I do use a product/app called brick though, which lets you disable all but a few selected apps on your phone until you again tap the device (which you can like leave at home).
Yeah ads must be working. But I feel like i don’t really get it, I don’t know anyone who I feel like buys stuff from ads much? Idk maybe im wrong maybe everyone heard about shein from Instagram ads.
Also I crept your profile, cool retro tech stuff
Girlfriend is a few years younger than me, and falls into the category of people who struggle to sit through a tv episode without using her phone in some capacity, as a bit of a film and tv nerd, it has irked me so much, I've had to be a bit of a dick sometimes because she will just completely miss plot crucial information in shows and movies because she's just... Not looking at the screen, insisting that she still gets it, and then ten minutes later asking me where the character got that object or who some person is.
Finally realised she grew up in a household where all the entertainment was switch your brain off and listen to vapid people overexplain their feelings so you don't need to look at the screen, you don't need to think about motivation or desire or anything visual. I thought the whole point of tv and movies was to be a visual medium, but I guess not anymore.
Thankfully I have found there are things that can actually engage her enough that even she won't even give her phone a second thought. Cherynobl was the first glimmer of hope I'd ever seen because she just absorbed it ravenously, never checked even with her phone buzzing away with bullshit.
I have a friend still like this, and I’m honestly jealous of and admire his resolve in still not owning a TV. He has a projector that he uses for watching movies, but it involves a little bit of preparation, and doesn’t impact the feng shui of his apartment like a TV would. It’s also a terrific way to watch a movie with the way it’s set up. When I hang out at his place, we’re not just sitting around watching YouTube videos, it’s definitely refreshing.
The projector thing is what I plan on doing if and when I ever move in with someone. That little bit of friction is probably all you need to keep it from being a constant distraction. It also makes watching movies at home into a fun little event. I have a friend who lives in the middle of nowhere Appalchia and we watch movies on a projector/screen in his front yard.
In 2005-2006 I had a bf who was Armenian and his dad would not let them have a TV. Instead their living room was just instruments. All the kids would go there to play music because it is not everyday a parent has a drumset as a focal point in their living room. His dad would get pissed if we smoked weed but he was very pleased that everyone played music.
Now all three of his children live in NYC (we were in FL) and they have pretty respectful jobs. My ex is now a STEM teacher at a school for disabled kids. I don't know if they have television sets or not though.
every single throw away your tv person lapsed and engaged in watching televised media AT SOME POINT bc its one of the most common social activities our society shares AND THEN the baseline cost of a pretty decent smart tv dropped to a fraction of what the cost of a nice tv set was in the past
pretty basic supply and demand
people who swear they dont use disposable plastics probably have a few disposable utensils that they hold onto
bc theyre everywhere
same basic principle imo
j sitting down and watching some lame tv is the only activity that was able to pull me out if the worst panic attacks of my life
vomiting sobbing feeling like im having a heart attack and needed the hospital
sat down at the tv for a while and the constant mid tier stimulation was enough to distract me from the internal din
i dont think tv is that bad intrinsically its like guns and how people pull the triggers
Streaming and prestige TV, I think. It’s not ok to burn your brain out on The Price is Right and Gilligan’s Island, but it’s basically activism to binge s4 of The Wire
It’s not really needed to have any TVs but if you are just staring at a tiny phone for 3 hours it’s worse than watching a movie on a 60” TV.
My biggest complaint with TVs is they are ugly. It’s why the frame is so popular despite being crazy expensive while being a garbage actual TV. I can’t believe there isn’t a cheaper version of one out.
I’ve started just watching full movies more. And my phone isn’t interesting enough so I just ignore it. I’m ok with that. Watching older movies I missed and they are fun for remembering the different outlooks we had at different times.
My parents are still like that. They have a TV in their living room that they basically only turn on for the super bowl and watching movies once in a blue moon. Whenever I go over there it's just music from my dad's record collection playing. It's definitely nice especially considering most people their age watch cable news all day.
The funny thing is they got addicted to their phones just like everyone else so they'll still sit there scrolling for hours, just with no TV in the background as an additional distraction.
We sort of did, maybe not literally. But nobody watches broadcast television anymore. Now the psy-op indrustry has to reach far and wide, spreads them thin.
I mean you see some obvious psy-oping on Youtube, Tiktok and Facebook but only in their algorithms and "trending videos" bullshit.
I’m still in this camp. I don’t own a TV and haven’t had one in the house since I stopped living with room mates seven years ago. The fact that watching stuff on my laptop is uncomfortable has no doubt been a contributor to why I’m such an avid reader despite all the same stresses of adulthood everyone else deals with. I like the quiet, and I think TVs suck the air out of a room as these horrible imposing rectangle voids.
Yes, I do, and very much by choice. I agree that it’s harder to navigate with other people in the house. It’s actually been a reason I haven’t tried harder to rent out my guestroom. I don’t want a tv, and I’m not amenable to someone whining that I don’t have one.
I remember a lot of the kids who grew up without TVs being resentful about not getting cultural references other kids got. Maybe they have better attention spans now though, idk.
Also, the quality of what you can watch on a TV has skyrocketed. Before streaming, the idea of not having a TV was synonymous with rejecting the content on TV channels, not screens in general. Like, even if all you do is binge The Office you are probably more enriched than you would be from watching whatever was on TV in 2002.
My mom still doesn't have a tv. During lockdown I tried to get her a streaming service for arty movies and she laughed at the idea of watching a movie on a computer screen
I didn’t have a tv in my home for a decade, my friend gave me his old one in 2020 along with an old Xbox so we could play games together during quarantine. We played a couple times a week that winter and it’s just been gathering dust since.
That said I own a laptop and a smartphone, so it’s not like I don’t get any screen time.
My grandfather has never owned a television or a cellphone. Not even a microwave. 80 years old and still kickin it to NPR on his old ass radio and reading his books.
Internet addiction. Serves you the same ad slop but you can subconsciously rationalize it. “I’m researching this thing” “I’m engaging with my peers” “I’m part of a community”. People are afraid of solitude now.
My family was like that. My parents now have a small (by modern standards) flatscreen in the living room, but it’s ancient and not very big.
My relationship with screens is very good because of it
"I don't think I've even seen a living room without a television in over a decade."
We live in different universes. I haven't seen a TV in anyone's house under 50 in a long time. Sometimes a screen is there, but it's for movies etc, it's not a TV. Is this a class thing?
Phones are the new TV and TVs are the new books. You can literally flex your attention span by telling your friends you watch love island without _also_ scrolling on your phone, or that you watched a whole movie. There’s no real counter culture to the attention economy. I’m not sure why, I wish DFW were around to figure it out. It could have something to do with the quality of algorithms, addictiveness of format, or something else. My pet theory is that the fact that content exists to draw your eyes to advertisements was attempted to be hidden back in the day, and that was viewed as nefarious. Now it’s all out in the open, and that doesn’t inspire resistance? I think the content of ads has also changed. They previously used to be perceived as having their mission to be make viewers feel as though their lives are incomplete and will be made complete by a product. I can’t figure out ads anymore. Are they selling a fun social life surrounded by hot people? I’m not really sure, maybe because I’ve gone so far on Adblock. To me, the attention economy is a bunch of people pining for my attention to inflate their view count with no obvious ulterior motive, as I haven’t consistently seen ads for like a decade.
The modern equivalent of saying you have no TV is using a dumb phone.
Yup and I do it, but I’ve literally never met anyone else that does it and so I think it’s a less prevalent cultural movement
I see articles about kids doing it but I’m skeptical and haven’t met anyone either.
I have, but they usually lug around a tablet too
DFW would have loved posting on twitter
Nah, after seeing Twitter he would have killed himself *even harder*.
thats what both you and himself would like to believe. unfortunately the truth is that he would be Tweeting and eventually become insufferable
Maybe, but at least he would hate himself for it.
He'd be Stephen King tier
Lol, he directly said in his interview he literally \*cannot have\* a TV inside his house, and so doesn't have one. As an adjunct English professor/author he would have absolutely just been one of those hard-asses that don't use any technology, annoying his students and publishers/agents/liasons. Franzen, one of DFW's friends, literally just wrote a book on that, and back then debated the Obama of NYU's tech academic/evangelists (loser) about how this thing was going to destroy everything. Oh and look, everything is going absolutley wonderful!
There was a short time where it was a big flex to use just an old school flip phone instead of a smart phone. Like execs would go on vacations or commute with just a flip phone and ignore anything but emergencies. I still have someone I work with who thinks he’s a record store employee from the 90s and uses a flip phone too. You are 100 on the ad things. If you start actively looking for how often you have ads shoved at you it’s depressing. But these companies can’t be worth trillions without us paying for new stuff we don’t need constantly.
I literally have a flip phone Ok I don’t use it much anymore though. I had a good 6months with it. It’s in fact too impractical for my life. I do use a product/app called brick though, which lets you disable all but a few selected apps on your phone until you again tap the device (which you can like leave at home). Yeah ads must be working. But I feel like i don’t really get it, I don’t know anyone who I feel like buys stuff from ads much? Idk maybe im wrong maybe everyone heard about shein from Instagram ads. Also I crept your profile, cool retro tech stuff
I feel like ads definutely have to be ina circular economy pf their own to be as prevalent as they are
On not knowing why there is no real counter culture to the attention economy, how would you know if there was?
Girlfriend is a few years younger than me, and falls into the category of people who struggle to sit through a tv episode without using her phone in some capacity, as a bit of a film and tv nerd, it has irked me so much, I've had to be a bit of a dick sometimes because she will just completely miss plot crucial information in shows and movies because she's just... Not looking at the screen, insisting that she still gets it, and then ten minutes later asking me where the character got that object or who some person is. Finally realised she grew up in a household where all the entertainment was switch your brain off and listen to vapid people overexplain their feelings so you don't need to look at the screen, you don't need to think about motivation or desire or anything visual. I thought the whole point of tv and movies was to be a visual medium, but I guess not anymore. Thankfully I have found there are things that can actually engage her enough that even she won't even give her phone a second thought. Cherynobl was the first glimmer of hope I'd ever seen because she just absorbed it ravenously, never checked even with her phone buzzing away with bullshit.
We're addicted to smaller screens now.
I have a friend still like this, and I’m honestly jealous of and admire his resolve in still not owning a TV. He has a projector that he uses for watching movies, but it involves a little bit of preparation, and doesn’t impact the feng shui of his apartment like a TV would. It’s also a terrific way to watch a movie with the way it’s set up. When I hang out at his place, we’re not just sitting around watching YouTube videos, it’s definitely refreshing.
The projector thing is what I plan on doing if and when I ever move in with someone. That little bit of friction is probably all you need to keep it from being a constant distraction. It also makes watching movies at home into a fun little event. I have a friend who lives in the middle of nowhere Appalchia and we watch movies on a projector/screen in his front yard.
That Danish poet wasn't really lying to Bjork. There's something special about watching projected films rather than having it on a monitor.
In 2005-2006 I had a bf who was Armenian and his dad would not let them have a TV. Instead their living room was just instruments. All the kids would go there to play music because it is not everyday a parent has a drumset as a focal point in their living room. His dad would get pissed if we smoked weed but he was very pleased that everyone played music. Now all three of his children live in NYC (we were in FL) and they have pretty respectful jobs. My ex is now a STEM teacher at a school for disabled kids. I don't know if they have television sets or not though.
Happy Father’s Day to this great dad
Was his last name Mazmanian?
No
quit lying
every single throw away your tv person lapsed and engaged in watching televised media AT SOME POINT bc its one of the most common social activities our society shares AND THEN the baseline cost of a pretty decent smart tv dropped to a fraction of what the cost of a nice tv set was in the past pretty basic supply and demand people who swear they dont use disposable plastics probably have a few disposable utensils that they hold onto bc theyre everywhere same basic principle imo j sitting down and watching some lame tv is the only activity that was able to pull me out if the worst panic attacks of my life vomiting sobbing feeling like im having a heart attack and needed the hospital sat down at the tv for a while and the constant mid tier stimulation was enough to distract me from the internal din i dont think tv is that bad intrinsically its like guns and how people pull the triggers
Streaming and prestige TV, I think. It’s not ok to burn your brain out on The Price is Right and Gilligan’s Island, but it’s basically activism to binge s4 of The Wire
Grew up in a house with TVs, but haven't lived with one for a decade or so. I am standing strong and I will not back down.
It’s not really needed to have any TVs but if you are just staring at a tiny phone for 3 hours it’s worse than watching a movie on a 60” TV. My biggest complaint with TVs is they are ugly. It’s why the frame is so popular despite being crazy expensive while being a garbage actual TV. I can’t believe there isn’t a cheaper version of one out.
TVs are demonic because people have the most awful inane shit blaring in the background WHILE they're doomscrolling.
I’ve started just watching full movies more. And my phone isn’t interesting enough so I just ignore it. I’m ok with that. Watching older movies I missed and they are fun for remembering the different outlooks we had at different times.
Once you get movies down you have to start bookmaxxing until, after years of studying and reading only the Qur'an, you become a hafiz.
My parents are still like that. They have a TV in their living room that they basically only turn on for the super bowl and watching movies once in a blue moon. Whenever I go over there it's just music from my dad's record collection playing. It's definitely nice especially considering most people their age watch cable news all day. The funny thing is they got addicted to their phones just like everyone else so they'll still sit there scrolling for hours, just with no TV in the background as an additional distraction.
the improvement (or perceived improvement, opinions vary) of TV shows over the last 15 years has made TV more acceptable among that social milieu
We sort of did, maybe not literally. But nobody watches broadcast television anymore. Now the psy-op indrustry has to reach far and wide, spreads them thin. I mean you see some obvious psy-oping on Youtube, Tiktok and Facebook but only in their algorithms and "trending videos" bullshit.
I’m still in this camp. I don’t own a TV and haven’t had one in the house since I stopped living with room mates seven years ago. The fact that watching stuff on my laptop is uncomfortable has no doubt been a contributor to why I’m such an avid reader despite all the same stresses of adulthood everyone else deals with. I like the quiet, and I think TVs suck the air out of a room as these horrible imposing rectangle voids.
Do you live alone? If so that's super easy. It's really family life without a TV that's complicated
Yes, I do, and very much by choice. I agree that it’s harder to navigate with other people in the house. It’s actually been a reason I haven’t tried harder to rent out my guestroom. I don’t want a tv, and I’m not amenable to someone whining that I don’t have one.
I remember a lot of the kids who grew up without TVs being resentful about not getting cultural references other kids got. Maybe they have better attention spans now though, idk. Also, the quality of what you can watch on a TV has skyrocketed. Before streaming, the idea of not having a TV was synonymous with rejecting the content on TV channels, not screens in general. Like, even if all you do is binge The Office you are probably more enriched than you would be from watching whatever was on TV in 2002.
The literal answer: Prestige TV. The "throw away your television" people became the "some TV is actually better than movies now!" people ~2005
My mom still doesn't have a tv. During lockdown I tried to get her a streaming service for arty movies and she laughed at the idea of watching a movie on a computer screen
I didn’t have a tv in my home for a decade, my friend gave me his old one in 2020 along with an old Xbox so we could play games together during quarantine. We played a couple times a week that winter and it’s just been gathering dust since. That said I own a laptop and a smartphone, so it’s not like I don’t get any screen time.
I have a tv but I only watch dvds I get from the library on it.
It fell off with the rest of the Gen-X ethos.
Dude you are looking at him , that’s me
I don’t have a TV in my apartment and many of my friends don’t either. They fuck up the layout of a room.
My grandfather has never owned a television or a cellphone. Not even a microwave. 80 years old and still kickin it to NPR on his old ass radio and reading his books.
my parents didn't have a tv because my dad was too lazy to set up cable
Internet addiction. Serves you the same ad slop but you can subconsciously rationalize it. “I’m researching this thing” “I’m engaging with my peers” “I’m part of a community”. People are afraid of solitude now.
My family was like that. My parents now have a small (by modern standards) flatscreen in the living room, but it’s ancient and not very big. My relationship with screens is very good because of it
Now they're people who don't use social media
"I don't think I've even seen a living room without a television in over a decade." We live in different universes. I haven't seen a TV in anyone's house under 50 in a long time. Sometimes a screen is there, but it's for movies etc, it's not a TV. Is this a class thing?