Ep. 382: Is the Internet Becoming Television?

Back in October, the journalist Derek Thompson published an intriguing essay on his Substack that was titled, Everything is Television. Now it created a bit of a stir among those who study technology and the internet for a living. Here's Derek actually in his own words summarizing the thesis of this article. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television.

So what did Derek mean by this? This is the question we're going to answer today. I'm going to both unpack and expand on Thompson's arguments and then add my own conclusions, including three predictions about what I think is going to happen next. Hopefully by the end of our discussion, you'll have a brand new way of understanding the sort of vaguely distressing but difficult to define changes that seem to have been happening in internet culture in recent years and have some ideas about what to expect and what to do to best react to the future. So let's get into it.

As always, I'm Cal Newport. And this is Deep Questions. Today's episode is the internet becoming television and what does this mean for you? All right, so I want to start by really diving into the big points from Derek Thompson's articles to see if we can make sense of what he's saying here.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (79 minutes, 15,997 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.