Is ever-better video content breaking society? By Matthew Yglesias

Is ever-better video content breaking society? By Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 11 minutes

Is ever-better video content breaking society?

The decades-long moral panic about television has probably been right all along

The term “moral panic” has been overused in recent years, but I think many of the latest takes on smartphones (they need to be banned from school and are responsible for a surge in teen suicides) have all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic.

In essence, our youthful mischief and entertainments were wholesome and beloved, whereas the new ones are wicked and evil. It’s something we heard about rap music and video games when I was a kid and about everything from Dungeons & Dragons to jazz to comic books before that. And yet as Tim Cook encourages us to spend more time sitting alone in dark rooms, enjoying immersive audiovisual experiences, I can’t help but think that the panickers, at least those of the last few decades, might have been on to something.

A classic trope of the “don’t worry so much” discourse reminds us that these concerns have been with us since the dawn of television and that efforts to find causal links between new content types and bad behavior tend to produce ambiguous results at best. In the late 1960s, the surgeon general tried to show a linkage between television violence and real-world violence but ultimately came up with nothing. And more modern findings actually suggest that violent movies reduce crime, because when young men are watching “John Wick” they are by definition not out of the house doing crime.

But this is where my worry creeps back in.

The classic panics are about the content that Kids These Days are consuming — it’s too violent, too sexual, too vulgar. In the case of the phone/suicide panic, it’s too interpersonal. I like the music that came out when I was in my teens and 20s a lot more than I like the music that’s coming out now that I’m in my 40s, and I’m painfully aware that every generation has had this experience. I used to think stores played a lot of lame music that my parents liked. Now that I’m a lame parent, I like the music they play in stores. And the most tempting thing in the world is to convince yourself that the entertainment content you like best is also in some sense morally best. But that is almost certainly wrong.

What I think is not wrong is that the unprecedented cornucopia of entertainment at our fingertips (ubiquitous smartphones, great televisions, streaming anywhere, on-demand everything) is very much a mixed blessing that is significantly exacerbating loneliness and other social ills.

The “screen time” dilemma

From a parenting perspective, the range of entertainment available to my son that did not exist when I was eight has some fantastic upsides. Being on an airplane is boring. It used to be that you’d have to watch a movie on a tiny screen in-aisle and it was rarely a kid-oriented movie. Today, a kid can watch or play whatever he wants on an iPad. Flying with tiny babies is annoying, but it’s easy to travel with a big kid because it’s really just an opportunity to chill out and enjoy unlimited screen time.

And this is true of any situation where the best alternative to screen time is something low-value.

That being said, it is almost certainly better for babies to be interacting with parents and other adult caregivers than to be staring at screens. And it’s better for older kids to be interacting with other children, learning social skills and building relationships that may be valuable over the longer term. It’s healthier to go outside and engage in physical activity than to sit on the couch, messing around with an iPad.

These tradeoffs have been with us as long as television has, and to state the obvious, the change to more entertainment options has come with a lot of upsides. I don’t know that re-reading my “Batman: Ten Nights of the Beast” trade paperback was in any way better than a kid today watching YouTube streamers. But the shift also has some distinct downsides. Something like Saturday morning cartoons was time-bounded. That was probably better for kids, and it also made things a lot easier for parents. You didn’t need to establish a “rule” about when a kid was allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons. They were only on during a defined period of time — Saturday mornings — and if it was some other time, you couldn’t watch them. That meant less fussing around the exact parameters of the screen time rules. But also just more time coming up with other stuff to do.

The fact that the “stay home and mess around on screens” option has gotten better means that much more friction between a child and basically any non-screen activity. This means both kids doing less stuff than they otherwise might, and also parents bickering with kids more than they otherwise might. But while there’s tons of discourse and dialogue about kids and screen time, the fundamental tradeoff applies to adults as well.

A life of possibilities

During her interview with Ezra Klein, Jean Twenge raised an interesting point about why gaming (done more by boys) is more benign than social media (used more by girls):

EZRA KLEIN: I found that pretty striking. Why do you think gaming is not as linked to some of these negative outcomes?

JEAN TWENGE: These days, the way most teens and adults game, it’s often interactive. So they’ll play games with their friends. They aren’t there face to face, but it’s often in real time. And they’ll often talk to each other as they’re playing the game. So not the same as running around outside playing football, say, but still in real time, and still interaction with friends, where on social media, only some of it is interaction with friends.

When I was a kid, of course, we didn’t have online gaming. But I would go over to my friend Brian’s house and we would play Sega Genesis. Or I’d go to my buddy Jeff’s where they had a PC (we had a Mac in my house because my mom was a graphic designer) and we’d play TIE Fighter. Or someone would come over to my house and we’d play SNES. From a technological perspective, this was worse than modern network gaming.

But I think Twenge’s point applies even more forcefully to those 20th-century interactions. The mistake of the moral panickers has been to pay too much attention to the content of the entertainment and not enough to their form. Something that you do with friends, whatever it is, has some useful spillover effects in terms of strengthening social bonds. Something that you do in isolation does not. I have a semi-joking take that the lowest ebb in male youth suicides happened in the late 1990s when GoldenEye was out on N64. It was a great game, far more technically compelling than old 16-bit games, but one you absolutely went over to your buddy’s house to play.

But that sort of thing is kind of a quirk of fate. The natural logic of entertainment technologies is to serve the use case of “sitting on the couch at home alone.”

I was an HDTV early adopter back when they were really expensive. As a result, people liked to come over to my house to watch HD football or Sopranos episodes or whatever we were all into at the time. As TVs got cheaper and better more people had them, which is progress, but also reduced the incentive for people to get together. Of course at times, better entertainment is just better. I remember a hurricane striking D.C. before I had my HDTV, back when Netflix was just discs in the mail. My roommate and I had nothing to do but sit around and watch the three Netflix DVDs we happened to have on hand. We’d have been much better off with a nicer television and streaming. But just as with kids, there’s a small but insidious slippage from:

If you have nothing better to do, your entertainment options just got less boring.

To:

Your entertainment options just got less boring, so there’s less reason to go do stuff.

The thing is, I don’t think you can point at one particular moment when the rise of ever-better home entertainment became a problem. People were raising alarms about the atomizing impact of television in the 1950s. Then we got color. Then we got cable. Then we got VCRs. Then the number of channels proliferated. And then we got DVDs. We got high-definition. We got streaming. And we got lots of things — like YouTube and TikTok — that aren’t “television” but are “watching videos on a screen.” And even though I feel nostalgia for what I grew up with (channel surfing basic cable), there’s nothing unique about that particular moment in the long, steady slide.

Life just keeps getting more and more entertaining, which has real benefits but also significant downsides.

Lonely planet

The problem with the acceleration in home entertainment, I think, is that while minimizing boredom makes people happy in the short-term, in the longer-run people are happiest when they have strong relationships with other human beings.

Twenty years ago, I was very optimistic about the social impact of the internet. I thought that by making it easier to sort through the huge mass of humanity, people would have an easier time finding social niches they enjoyed and that time spent online would complement offline socializing. My broad thought was that the “Bowling Alone” problem Robert Putnam diagnosed while I was in college was largely a consequence of television promoting social atomization and that the internet would solve it.

And for me, personally, that has basically worked. Several of my best friends in D.C. are people who I originally met because we were early adopting bloggers, and a bunch more are second-degree connections I made through the early blogosphere. That said, these relationships were made concrete by happy hours and other meetups and eventually institutionalized in a pub trivia team and a weekly poker night. I’m a bad poker player and middling at pub trivia, but the money lost on those ventures more than repaid itself in terms of long-run social capital. So for me, I think the internet has really paid off, not just in terms of giving me a career but in terms of helping to facilitate both weak and strong IRL social ties.

I wish I could say this was the dominant trend because I think it’s weird for a person in my line of work to have a downer take on the internet, but I don’t think it’s true.

Everywhere you look, people are spending more time alone. The trend in teen loneliness is particularly striking since that cohort is probably the most heavily exposed to the impact of technological change. But what we’re seeing is not limited to teenagers.

There’s been a big rise, for example, in the number of adult men who say they have no friends. Takes abound on why that is, but I think the simplest one is that male friendships are usually based on shared activities. If the quality of the “stay home and mess around on screens” experience goes up, then the amount of time spent doing other stuff goes down, and if you don’t do stuff with others, you’re not making deposits in the friendship bank.

For the sake of Slow Boring’s business model, it’s probably worth drawing a distinction here. The reason the early internet felt so promising is that it mostly seemed like a virtuous alternative to television; reading about niche interests and discussing them with other people in comments sections was an improvement on watching “ER” to pass the time. But most newer internet things (Netflix, TikTok, Instagram) are like television, but more so just ways to make passive visual content consumption even more compulsive.

Give a gift subscription

So keep subscribing here or even give a gift to someone who might enjoy it. But I think we should worry about the rollout of new tech that largely amounts to making the video-watching experience more compelling.

Goggling alone

A lot of people were shocked by the $3,500 price tag for the Vision Pro goggles that Apple is planning to release next year. To be boring and non-contrarian, for most people that price is a deal breaker whether or not the goggles are cool. But I do think it’s worth saying that if you set recency bias aside, it’s not an unreasonable price point for a brand-new consumer electronics category — it’s basically what cutting-edge computer stuff cost in the 1980s.

The Vision Pro goggles are a lot more impressive as a technology product than the PowerBook 100, they cost less in inflation-adjusted terms, median income in the United States is higher than it was in 1991, and median income in the world is a lot higher than it was in 1991. John Gruber actually got to use the goggles and his take was “Are you going to want to buy a Vision Pro for $3,500? That price is high enough that the answer is probably not, for most of you, no matter how compelling it is. But are you going to want to try one out for an hour or two, and find yourself craving another hour or two? I guarantee it.”

That sounds like a formula for success to me. Rich weirdos will buy it. Less-rich weirdoes will be jealous. The next iteration will be cheaper and more people will get them.

Nilay Patel says the goggles are “still searching for purpose,” but the short-term purpose seems really clear to me: you’re going to sit on your couch and watch television with them, and they’re going to provide a really great immersive video-watching experience. And to the extent that most people are already spending a lot of time watching videos alone, this will make their lonely video-watching experience better. That’s going to encourage people, at the margin, to spend slightly more time watching videos alone. This month, a lot of people will take Christopher Nolan’s advice and find an IMAX screen to watch Oppenheimer on, just like a lot of people went to see Avatar 2 on a 3D screen last year. Avatar 3 will probably have a bigger goggles audience.

I’m on the record as saying I think the kind of nostalgia economics that’s peddled by various trad Twitter accounts is total nonsense.

But I do think that at some point we need to acknowledge that these waves of nostalgia are driven by something beyond pure ignorance. And a big part of it, I think, is that the multi-generation moral panic about improved video entertainment driving social isolation is largely correct. The technology keeps improving, but it’s not making our lives better.

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