drowning in entertainment: the age of distraction

Source: drowning in entertainment: the age of distraction, oliSUNvia, 33:26, uploaded 2023-04-01, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 1530.

oliSUNvia opens with a quotation attributed to Gilles Deleuze about the need for gaps of solitude and silence in a world full of words and images. The first story is a joke about the ancient Greek philosopher Chrysippus, who supposedly laughed himself to death after seeing a donkey eat figs. The ancestry connecting Chrysippus to Sisyphus is marked as an “absolute lie”. The joke still supplies the video’s first image of a person being overcome by amusement.

That story leads to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985. Postman’s worry is more exact than the claim that people have lost access to reliable information. A society can receive so much information that its members lose their sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance can be corrected. A person who mistakes a stream of disconnected facts for knowledge has a harder problem.

Orwell, Huxley and the pleasure of submission

Postman compares George Orwell’s 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell imagines oppression through surveillance, censorship, uniformity and an authority that forces people to behave in the same way. Huxley imagines a society that keeps people docile through pleasure. Its citizens take soma, accept the factories that produce babies, and participate in the conditions that control them. The first system has to compel obedience. The second teaches people to enjoy the life that confines them.

The distinction gives the video its opening concern. A culture can lose its freedom whilst it remains full of expression, choice and amusement. The threat comes from learning to accept distraction as the natural form of life. The video connects its argument to a familiar personal change. The presenter remembers reading for hours as a child and doing homework without checking a phone. Now half an hour of work can produce a physical need to look at a screen, whilst a lecture feels dull unless she keeps her brain busy by typing.

Short videos and short posts offer an obvious explanation. Fifteen-second TikToks, 250-character posts and advertising interrupt the time that used to belong to one activity. The video asks whether the change reaches further than a decline in attention span. Its answer begins with the form of media itself.

Media as a metaphor for what it carries

A medium stands between a person and the thing they want to communicate. The video uses the word “metaphor” in a practical sense. A clock represents time so successfully that people begin to treat minutes and hours as if they were the thing itself. A book can carry knowledge, a film can represent love, and a news programme can represent knowledge about the world. The representation becomes easy to confuse with what it represents.

The dominant medium changes how a society communicates and what it can imagine. A car is more than a faster horse because it changes the design of cities, the value placed on nature, and the way people display status. A television is more than moving photography. A computer is more than an improved typewriter. The form of a medium makes some kinds of content easier to express and makes other kinds awkward or impossible.

The video demonstrates this with a fork and a lighter. A fork can cut if someone insists, although its shape makes it better suited to picking things up. A lighter could encode complex thoughts in Morse code, given enough time. Its ordinary form communicates danger more easily. Speech can explain Hegel’s dialectic or the digestive system because language carries relations between ideas. The medium favours certain messages before a speaker has chosen the subject.

oliSUNvia thinks people still describe the present as a print society, even though images and sound now carry much of public communication. The phrase “visual-audio society” names a change in the dominant form. The point is not that books have vanished. Photos, videos, music, speech and short text now shape the ordinary route through information, and they bring their own limits with them.

Telegraphs, speed and information without a question

The video locates the change before the internet. In nineteenth-century America, railways could move information only as fast as people and objects could travel. The telegraph separated information from physical distance. News about an affair in Texas could reach New York and Louisiana within minutes, even though the places stood at different distances from the event.

The new speed changed what counted as valuable information. Local newspapers had reported events that affected people who knew the places and people involved. Telegraphy made it possible to receive news about strangers and distant events without any personal connection to them. The value moved towards whatever sounded new, shocking or interesting, because the system rewarded the rapid transmission of more material.

Postman’s questions make the change concrete. How often does a morning news item alter a person’s plans, lead them to act, or help them solve a problem? What does a celebrity’s botched cosmetic surgery do to the day? How many people who read about a war or earthquake on another continent take action because of it? Much of the information people consume exists to give them something to discuss or to make them feel entitled to an opinion.

The telegraph turned information into a commodity that could circulate without a clear use. Trivia games and crossword puzzles appear in the video as responses to this glut. People had accumulated facts that belonged to nobody’s immediate problem, so they invented situations in which recall could count as intelligence. Knowing about many things started to stand in for knowing something well.

The telegraph also weakened context. A written passage holds its sentences together and gives the reader time to see their relation. Headlines, slogans and one-line messages can travel without the history or consequence that would make them intelligible. A social-media feed repeats the same break. A video about class consciousness can be followed by a cat clip that changes the mind’s subject before the first thought has settled.

The result is a sequence of statements that leaves the hard work to the viewer. A fragment about a virus spreading from China may report an event whilst leaving questions about its cause, movement and proper response unanswered. People then fill the gap with whatever assumptions they already hold. The video links this missing context to the confidence and hostility of online arguments, and to the shallow TikTok explanations that announce “two reasons” without explaining either one. A confident sentence remains a sentence, not proof.

The authority of the image

Visual communication changes the relation between representation and truth. In a print society, public figures were known through what they wrote or said. Early American presidents could walk through public streets without being recognised because their appearance carried little political information. Today the names Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter and Albert Einstein call up images before their work or speech.

Photography worked well with the telegraph because it gave distant information a face. The telegraph made unknown people and places available. The photograph made them familiar in sensory terms. A picture of a soldier returning from war can impose itself in a way that a written account may not. The image appears to offer contact with the event, even though it still frames and selects what the viewer sees.

The video draws a distinction between a sentence and a picture. A sentence makes a claim that can be accepted or questioned. “The sky is blue” and “olisunvia is six feet tall” ask the reader to consider whether they are true. A photograph seems to remove that work. An unedited picture of a person standing six feet tall appears to settle the matter, even though the picture still carries choices about framing and context.

An imagined dentist’s advertisement makes the same point. Written claims about hiring from Harvard or following a 2020 handbook invite questions about evidence and accuracy. A visual advertisement can make the viewer feel clean, safe or hungry without offering a proposition that can be tested in the same way. The image creates an impression before it provides an argument.

Entertainment as the default form

The argument arrives at entertainment. oliSUNvia makes clear that she likes being entertained and sees nothing wrong with pleasure. The problem begins when entertainment becomes the default form of every experience, so that “entertaining” becomes a rough synonym for useful or worth attending to. A lesson, a trial, a political speech and a news report acquire the same demand for pace and stimulation.

News offers the clearest case. Television selects attractive presenters, uses opening and closing music, gives stories a short duration, and invites the viewer back tomorrow after showing a few minutes of murder or disaster. The format makes the news resemble a show about the world. A serious event becomes a quick segment between other segments, and the presenter has to maintain a smooth expression whilst describing something that would horrify a person who had witnessed it directly.

The same treatment reaches televised trials about rape and murder. The cases are arranged for drama until they resemble a soap opera. Presidential speeches and debates receive a similar treatment when broadcasters prefer a candidate’s joke or quick line to the accuracy of the policy behind it. The form tells the audience what kind of attention the event deserves before the audience has considered the event itself.

The format also rewards instant reactions. Online audiences do not want to watch a person sit with a question and say that they need time to think. A rapid answer feels more watchable than uncertainty. The video uses debates and reaction clips to show how a person can sound informed whilst knowing little. Years of coverage of the war in Afghanistan did not mean that most Americans knew the languages, constitutional arrangements, or political histories of the people involved. A person could hold an opinion without having acquired the background needed to form one.

The example of critical race theory makes the same point in a smaller frame. People in a street interview object to teaching it, then admit that they do not know what it is. The dangerous form of disinformation, the video argues, creates the feeling of knowledge whilst moving a person away from knowledge. The mistake is not simply missing a fact. It is mistaking the confidence produced by a media format for understanding.

Advertising completes the conversion. A news programme can move from an earthquake death toll or a family murder to a commercial for a fast-food item without asking the viewer to notice the break. The video compares this with placing a clothing advertisement several times inside a serious book. The interruption would change the book’s status because readers expect its argument to maintain continuity. Television has made the interruption ordinary.

oliSUNvia finds the same structure in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Plutarch explains to President Snow that the regime can contain a revolution by turning attention towards Katniss’s engagement, dress and wedding cake whilst the executions and fear remain outside the frame. The scene is a fictional description of propaganda, yet the video recognises its rhythm in news coverage. Political violence stays present whilst the audience is encouraged to discuss the spectacle around it.

The video then stages its own problem. A sponsor message for Nebula arrives after the imagined book advertisement, and the presenter sells a service that supports longer educational videos. She also describes YouTube’s restrictions and the freedom a different platform can offer creators. The break is part of the video’s commercial structure, yet the video uses that structure to show how easily a serious argument can be interrupted. It leaves the tension visible instead of claiming a position outside the system it describes.

The shrinking interval of care

Rapid switches tell viewers that a minute, or a few seconds, is enough time to care about a subject. The platform decides when attention should move on. The video contrasts this with a debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in which one speaker talked for three hours, the audience went home for dinner, and the discussion continued for four more hours. The event had no music, pictures or fast-cut stage. People still gave seven hours to political speech because they treated political education as worth that time.

Modern presidential debates last about ninety minutes, with each speaker receiving a few minutes per topic. Clips add ads and other visual stimulation around the debate. The video reports that the average television shot lasted 3.5 seconds in 1985 and suggests that the interval has shortened since then. Serious subjects now appear beside cooking videos, The Simpsons clips or Subway Surfers footage. The added material keeps the eye busy whilst the subject loses its place.

The loss of sustained attention also changes memory. Bill Moyers’s observation, quoted in the video, is that Americans know much about the last twenty-four hours and little about the last sixty years or sixty centuries. oliSUNvia connects this thin memory to the appeal of nostalgia. A person can remember the feeling of a summer or a musical era without retaining the facts and conflicts that shaped it. The past becomes a general warmth detached from the conditions that produced it.

The video essay inside the problem

oliSUNvia turns the argument towards her own work. She wears make-up, edits out pauses, adds outside footage, and tries to keep the viewer from looking at her face for too long. Her videos use the techniques that hold attention, and advertisements interrupt them. She wonders whether the visual form of a video essay makes the creator’s image more representative than her words and ideas.

She does not settle the question by condemning the form. For her, an educational and entertaining YouTube video can lead to books and further learning. The same format can open a subject that a viewer would not have approached through a written article. The benefit depends on what the entertainment does. It can carry a person towards attention that lasts longer, although it can also train the viewer to expect every idea to arrive with the same stimulation.

The image still changes how people judge the person behind the work. A creator becomes a face, a personality and a friend-like presence before the audience has considered the claims being made. Advertising extends the pattern to athletes, musicians, chefs and chess players, who become images that can sell a product. The video argues that politics has absorbed the same logic. Politicians appear in comedy sketches, commercials and gaming streams, whilst the appearance of a candidate or the feeling they create can matter more than their policies.

Joe Biden becomes familiar through memes about verbal and physical slips. Justin Trudeau is known to some viewers as an attractive internet figure. Richard Nixon once blamed an election loss on bad make-up and advised his opponent to lose weight. These examples keep politics attached to appearance, performance and celebrity rather than to the work of governing.

Celebrity coverage closes the circle. Sites such as the Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29 and Entertainment Tonight present private drama as serious cultural knowledge. Harry Frankfurt’s idea of the “bullshit speech act” gives the video a term for the next stage. The speaker is indifferent to whether a statement is true or false because the statement’s use lies in the act of saying it.

The video applies this to celebrity gossip that connects a pop song, an actor’s affair and a film set. The claim travels because it is enjoyable to repeat. A lie still treats truth as something that matters, since the liar has to avoid it. Bullshit removes that constraint. It turns public speech into a way to keep the performance going.

The final warning returns to political control. A dictator needs censorship when people care about the difference between serious news and falsehood. If political discourse already takes the form of a joke, censorship becomes less necessary. The audience can hear everything and still lose the ability to tell which statements deserve belief, attention or action.

Limits and references

This note reconstructs oliSUNvia’s interpretation of Neil Postman and the related examples in the video. The video names Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change”, and “Informing Ourselves to Death”, along with Jenny Odell’s “The Case for Nothing” and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Those works are listed in the description, yet this note does not independently verify every quotation, historical example, figure or attribution made in the video. The opening Deleuze quotation is not identified further.

The Lincoln–Douglas debate, the 3.5-second television shot length, the account of telegraphy, and the claims about attention and memory remain evidence as presented by the speaker. The video uses jokes, clips, visual editing and a sponsor break as part of its case. That form makes the argument concrete and gives it a built-in qualification: video essays can make an idea easier to approach, while the same tools can train an audience to leave before the idea has developed.

Further reading / references

• Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985).
• Neil Postman, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” (1998).
• Neil Postman, “Informing Ourselves to Death” (1990).
• Jenny Odell, “The Case for Nothing”, in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019).
• Neil Postman: Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death? Part I, December 1985.
• Nicholas Carr: The Shallows – What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.