The work of the American novelist David Foster Wallace is littered with little prophecies. In a 2003 interview Foster Wallace described a new problem he had encountered watching television. He couldn’t stop. “I’ve become convinced,” he explained, “that there’s something really good on another channel and that I’m missing it. And so instead of watching, I’m scanning anxiously back and forth for this thing that I want but I don’t know what it is.”
“Infinite scroll” is the term now used for the technology behind never-ending social media timelines that endlessly refresh whenever you bump up against the bottom of the page. The idea is to produce compulsive behaviours in users who keep on scrolling in a state of permanent anticipation. Perhaps one more swipe will yield the animal video or conspiracy theory capable of wringing another drop of dopamine from an overtaxed brain.
This innovation — perhaps the key weapon in big tech’s armoury of addictive technologies — is usually attributed to Facebook but Foster Wallace, in his beadily observant way, noticed something similar was happening on multi-channel television more than two decades ago. You could infinitely scroll with a TV remote.
We are used to the idea of the smartphone as a dramatic worldaltering technology. But when the historians of the future look back on our time as the “screen age”, they may not mark its dawn with Apple’s 2007 iPhone launch. It’s possible they will see a continuous screen revolution beginning in the 1950s, when television first became widespread, and then accelerating through the late 20th century and into the present.
As the US journalist Derek Thompson points out, the smartphone — once hailed as the device that would connect the world — is turning out to be much more like television than we once thought. In a recent court case Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook argued that it is not really a social media company because so little of the time its users spend on the platform is social. More than 80 per cent of time spent on Facebook and 90 per cent of time on Instagram is now spent watching videos.
Indeed, watching videos, it sometimes seems, is all anyone does online. YouTube shows videos.
Netflix shows videos. TikTok shows videos. So, increasingly, do Twitter and Reddit. Most big podcasts now broadcast video as well as audio.
Most news organisations are (in the industry jargon) “pivoting to video”.
In Thompson’s phrase, nowadays “everything is television”. Where the internet was once interactive, it is becoming more passive and TV-like.
Surveys find that the numbers of people who say they use social media “to keep up with friends” or “to share my opinion” have fallen steeply over the past decade. Increasingly popular answers are “to follow celebrities” and “to fill spare time”.
In 1980 CNN became the first 24-hour news channel in the world
The once-fashionable idea that the internet would give everyone their Warholian 15 minutes of fame is looking less and less true. The old divide between celebrities (or “influencers”) and civilians is reasserting itself. A tiny minority of people are responsible for producing the vast majority of the most-viewed content.
Looking back, 1980 may seem as revolutionary a year as 2007. It was in 1980 that CNN became the world’s first 24-hour news channel.
Every human entertainment ever devised before then was of finite duration — even Wagner operas finish eventually. But henceforth it would be possible to be entertained permanently. This was the beginning of the slow replacement of reality by screentime. By the 1990s, Americans were spending four hours a day watching television.
It’s often noticed that the smartphone has shattered our information environment into a wilderness of decontextualised fragments (so you can scroll past footage of the Gaza war and a puppy doing backflips in the space of three disorientating seconds) but television got there first. As long ago as 1985, the media theorist Neil Postman charged TV with a “Now ... this” mentality, referring to the phrase once used by news anchors to segue inanely from, say, news of a famine to a 30-second report about a cat stuck up a tree. “Now ... this” could be the motto of TikTok.
Similarly the TV critic James Poniewozik has drawn a parallel between Twitter and the chyrons which race along the bottom of news channels with their endless, urgent vomit of information both “terrifying” (“WHITE HOUSE EVACUATED ... FAA HAS SHUT DOWN ALL DOMESTIC FLIGHTS ...”) and “bathetic” (“IPHONE 4 IN SHORT SUPPLY FOR CHINA LAUNCH ... LINDSAY LOHAN COULD ENTER REHAB THIS WEEK”). And anyone who thinks addictive outrage is a purely algorithmic invention of the smartphone needs to watch old shows such as CNN’s Crossfire or Paxman-era Newsnight.
It’s no accident that many of the baleful social trends accelerated by the smartphone can also be traced to the pre-smartphone screen age.
Partisanship was already ratcheting up in America by the late 1990s when Newt Gingrich (a former star of Crossfire) led the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton. The decline of real-world socialising was noticed in surveys as long ago as the 1970s when people began to report they were spending their free time watching TV rather than going to church or knitting circles. Falling IQ may begin with the arrival of television, not the smartphone: a study of intelligence in Norwegian citizens found declines began in those born after 1975.
The smartphone is undeniably a revolutionary technology. It really has changed everything: from politics to culture to social life. But the strange paradox is that it is evolutionary too. Not just a rupture in history but the culmination of existing trends. The screen age has a deeper history than we remember.
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