Lincoln, Douglas and Netflix

I just finished streaming the latest season of “The White Lotus.” And “House of the Dragon,” “The Peripheral,” “The Crown,” “Andor,” “The Rings of Power” and too many more. What a change from May 1961, when Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called television a “vast wasteland.” Or 1992, when Bruce Springsteen sang “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On).”

Many shows exist only because computer-generated imagery can create otherworldly landscapes and gravity-defying creatures. Like it or not, Silicon Valley owns Hollywood. Well, not literally, but clearly today’s Hollywood wouldn’t exist without Silicon Valley’s streaming technology and high-end graphics. As these two industries continue to merge, which will become more dominant driving society and culture?

I have to admit, I’m usually in the camp suggesting that Hollywood makes us dumber and technology makes us smarter. But now we are at Yogi Berra’s fork in the road. Sure, I have my beefs with Hollywood, with its preachy output and woke agendas. Most of the shows I mentioned above pushed back against toxic masculinity, the punching bag du jour. But increasingly I think streaming is making us smarter, while social media is bringing out the goldfish in us.

In the old days of 22-minute sitcoms, almost every episode had three intertwining plots. The A plot was the main one, “The One With Monica and Chandler’s Wedding,” while the B plot was often centered on another character, think “Kramer takes over Moviefone.” The C plot is often incidental, like Jim and Pam playing pranks on Dwight in “The Office.” This TV-writing formula was meant to please the lowest common denominator. These intertwining plots were why “Friends” had six main characters. You could pair up any two in any given plot. “Seinfeld” had four but often plugged in two other characters: Newman, Puddy or Jerry’s parents at Del Boca Vista. A-B-C! This defined the mostly mindless over-the-airwaves television. As the saying goes, television is 50 inches wide and barely an inch deep.

But with cable came more bandwidth and time available on premium networks such as HBO, so more characters could fit in each season. Shows could have long arcs and much more complexity. Think of how many twisty plots and characters filled “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” This lengthened the attention span of viewers. Characters could be developed over years—such as Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions involving his mother. Try doing that in 22 minutes. Was it good for us? Author Steven Johnson suggested “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” in 2005 in the New York Times. I think he was right, and that was way before streaming.

Today we have infinite storage and massive bandwidth to deliver elaborate narratives that make you think. Stories lasting an hour and 40 minutes (they used to be called movies) seem quaint compared with the typical streaming show, with 10 or so episodes of 48 minutes a season. Of course, not everything makes us smart. I can’t explain “Tiger King” or “Dahmer” or even “The Bachelor,” though this season is sure to be riveting. Face it, sometimes we simply want to be entertained.

I think many videogames make us smarter as well. We’ve come a long way from “Space Invaders.” Far beyond mindless pursuits, multiplayer videogames reward quick thinking and teach team building—modern knowledge-worker training. On a family visit to Normandy, one of my sons told me he had already been there, having played the D-Day battle on “Call of Duty: WWII.” Very cool—and educational!

Something is working. Intelligence increases by three IQ points a decade—it’s known as the Flynn effect. Maybe it’s better living, but surely advancing technology and mind-expanding pursuits have something to do with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Flynn effect is accelerating.

But I worry on the pure technology side. Search engines certainly have the ability to augment human intelligence, but you often need to know what you’re looking for to find it. Facebook and LinkedIn are great to connect with other people, but you probably get smarter from interactions away from these platforms. Human-mimicking machine learning and artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, are still early, we’ll see where they head.

Then there’s Twitter. In 2017 tweets expanded from 140 to 280 characters, but it’s still the realm of short attention spans. Same for Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. Do they make us smarter? Perhaps. But think about this: The typical TikTok video is 21 to 34 seconds. The attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds. We’re getting dangerously close. Twitter may soon expand to 4,000 characters, but is that even enough? Next to this column online is a link typically saying, “Listen to article (5 minutes)”—an eternity (and thank you for reading or listening!). Even worse, fewer and fewer people read books anymore. Crypto klepto Sam Bankman-Fried even suggested, “If you wrote a book, you [fouled] up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

So here we are. TV and streaming are getting longer and longer, well beyond sitcoms and movies, expanding to hours and hours of complex narrative. Amazon Prime promises 50 hours of “The Rings of Power” over five seasons. Yikes. That’s the streaming model: Charge monthly for all-you-can-eat and have enough tasty treats at the buffet.

While Disney and others are losing gobs of money as they make the transition from traditional TV, streaming works. Netflix has more than 220 million global paying subscribers who don’t have enough time to consume all the entertainment. At the same time, free mobile-app experiences are getting shorter and shorter, with their own business model of influencers and selling ads. TikTok has 1.5 billion users, and there could never be enough time to consume the infinite well of video clips. Can these coexist? I think so, but I worry about future generations.

In his 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman compared the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which drew huge crowds that would stick around all day, with television’s 22-minute schlock. I don’t think daylong debates will return, but today’s binge-watching comes close. Goodbye to only lowest-common-denominator plots. At the same time, the bar for intelligence has gone even lower as amusing TikToky technology has accelerated the goldfish-attention-span problem. But people are deep. For those too lazy to read books, technology has enabled not only computer-generated visual extravaganzas, but also fabulous stories with complex characters that make us think. I’m not sure that’s all bad.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text