The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
I'm mildly affected by "modern web" issues, and I reckon that the imaginative part of my brain is in a coma whenever I browse these sites. The minute I'm outside of an internet connection, a whole lot of emotions, ideas, plans come back at once. And very very rarely can I browse the web while not losing that. This is something I didn't experience before... say smartphones, even with a good dsl line, i wasn't dilluted in pages likes that.
ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era.. as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye your perception of the web is altered IMO.
I experience the same thing when I travel, especially when I travel on foot or by bicycle. These long periods of low stimulus thought are really helpful. It makes me want to do a lot of things off-screen.
When I am home I really struggle to put things into practice because the easiest thing to do when I wake up is to look at my phone before I sit at my computer.
I do a lot of meaningful work on the computer, but I’m uneasy about how frictionless it is to just be on the computer and never act in the real world.
You’re commenting on an article about reading, which is also a solitary passive consumption activity. I suspect you’re not trying to make the point that reading books destroys relationships and self construction, so this seems like a roundabout way of saying that your favored passive consumption activity is better than what other people choose.
Reading a book is not really passive. Especially if it's a good book. You have to constantly imagine the layouts and the connections the book is trying to draw. For me, after years of Internet, getting back to books made me appreciate my younger self because books need active imagination and follow-through in the brain. I was able to do that effortlessly when I was a child. In fact, if you read all the HN comments the way you read books, it will be challenging(if you have no book reading habits).
I don't use imagination when I read. The connections are instinctual, and the layouts are often irrelevant (which I can say because I've never attempted to consider them and don't ever find myself missing out on the story).
I'd like to say I'm astounded when I hear other people visit other worlds when they read, but really that whole idea is so foreign to me, it might as well be a complete lie. I have no thread in which to pull on to begin to imagine it. I chalk it up to aphantasia, but my point is that not everyone processes and interacts with the world in the same way you might.
So when a scene is described, what happens in your head? You take it all in as a sort of dry list of facts? If someone gets punched in the face that conjures an image of a fist connecting with a face for me.
> You take it all in as a sort of dry list of facts?
"dry list" was your description, not mine. But also, no. Take the common example;
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
You don't have to imagine a picture of shoes, nor of a for sale sign to go... "oh, shit...".
Or even even that's too far to grasp... consider the melody of happy song, or a sad song. I assume you don't imagine a piano to figure out which it is?
Yes, I was trying to figure out how that would work, describing how I imagined it as a starting point. Not saying that’s how you experience it (hence the question mark)
I don’t have to imagibe baby shoes to understand what they are, or what happened, but if I read ‘baby shoes’ there’s definitely an image of small shoes appearing in my mind (constantly morphing, because the description doesn’t give me anything to go off).
If I read ‘sad song’, some variation of a sad song will play in my mind.
Of course often you read many of those things in sequence, and the mental scene constructs itself as you learn more.
If you read quickly it’s a bit vague, not enough time to truly think about it, but it’s there. At least for me.
> “Bitch,” he repeated. The mallet came down. She shoved herself upward and it landed just below her kneecap. Her lower leg was suddenly on fire. Blood began to trickle down her calf. And then the mallet was coming down again. She jerked her head away from it and it smashed into the stair riser in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, scraping away the flesh from her ear.
Does your mind conjure no images while reading this?
Aphantasia is hard to explain, especially in a drive by comment.
I'm not the person you're replying to but the answer, for me, depends on what you really mean by conjuring images. Very technically no, I see no images for this but I don't know if that is truly the whole point of what you're asking.
I mostly understand what is happening but I also really struggle to get the angles right in my mind of someone swinging a mallet quickly and one time hitting a shin and the next aimed for the head so maybe I'm missing something.
There are other senses involved as well even though it isn't visual, including things like spatial reasoning or maybe even something like proprioception - like I said it's hard to explain.
I can imagine myself in this position better than I can "visualize" it happening to someone else.
Aphantasia is really annoying to explain to people, like trying to explain blindness to a person who's always seen. I can't "see" anything, but I'm able to reason about it and kinda trace what I imagine with my eyes.
Interestingly enough, I have very lucid dreams and have realized that I am able to visualize (with color!) inside of them. I can't imagine being able to do that at will while awake, must be amazing.
I also can "see" in my dreams! Aphantasia is so fascinating to me because it helps me think about all these senses in much smaller units. I think the more we study and learn about aphantasia the better we will understand the brain in general. It is kind of like a natural experiment where you can remove one piece of the system and reason about the whole because of what changes.
For example, I had never considered that there would be different processes involved with imagining something visual vs recalling it but now that seems super obvious to me! I love when something tweaks my perspective and suddenly a new world of possibilities is revealed.
This happens with all forms of art, it's not unique to the written word. With movies and TV you're imagining the world outside the frame borders. With paintings you're imagining the whole scene or story depending on the piece.
So there's a point here that TikTok is competing for leisure time that in its absence has a better chance of being imaginative but I think that undersells the creativity of social media to a degree.
I think that's the key thing. Social media bombards us with stimuli based on an algorithm optimizing for what will grab our attention best. It doesn't matter if it has value, or even if it can hold our attention, because there's always some new novelty in the pipeline.
Long-form writing ask us to choose a subject and then focus deeply and deliberately on it. It's more demanding and more rewarding.
You can have passive experiences via either medium. TikTok is really optimized for that shallow level of engagement though and books trend in the opposite direction.
I will say that it is different to me, but perhaps others consume things like tiktok or instagram like I do books.
To me, I do not reminisce or think about tiktoks / instagram posts having an impact on my life or how I think or how I interact with others. Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read. I kind of know this, as I'm thinking about books I read in highschool over 20 years ago at the moment.
I suppose they give me things to think about beyond the moment I'm reading them, they make me feel things I otherwise wouldn't etc. It's possible for these things in media like movies, and even tiktok too I would imagine.
The reverse is also possible for books to be junk that you read and enjoy in the moment but soon forget.
But I also think the algorithm / profit motive behind tiktok and social media in general tends to mean that it's more likely to be junk, and it's not the person's fault who gets pulled into that. They're brutally effective skinner boxes, imo. Just like some games (mmos and now live service for even shooters).
There's something missing in the current media landscape that the old one did have, which was finality. You read a book, it's over. Similar with older movies, but now we have a bit of the "keep up with the starwars or marvel" thingy which is a bit live service like if you think about it. A constant desire to make folks feel like they have to keep up. Yeah things had sequels before, so I'm probably just waxing nostalgic here.
I'm rambling, sorry, just wanted to share some of my current thoughts.
I'm sure if tiktok didn't exist, these folks would be putting on 24/7 soap operas instead. The desire for a background thing to passively consume has likely always existed. Be it radio, whatever.
The algorithm does seem to be ruthless these days though, god if I know what I mean by that.
> perhaps others consume things like tiktok or instagram like I do books
> Five years from now I do not think I will fondly remember a post, but probably I'll think about the books I read
Exactly what I was thinking. I can still tell you about the first novel I read, first trilogy, favorite books, least favorite, and also each of those per genre. I can tell you what was going on in my life at the time.
The only thing I can say about social media posts are that I have a handful of vague memories of times when someone I knew or knew of would post something that made me realize they had a side I didn’t know of, and not in a good way.
I’m reminded of a quote I read recently, paraphrased: social media connects limbic systems, not prefrontal cortexes. I might take issue with the pure dichotomous nature of that statement, but I think it holds generally.
A book sticks with you, but reels phase through you like light through a window. Once the book is finished, your mind races with ideas about the book; good or bad.
Instagram reels leave you with nothing. Once the next reel passes, the previous one is flushed down the memory, as if these last 28 seconds were nothingness.
While the humble reel only demands a vague trance-like state and your eyes turned to the phone, the books needs your full attention and mental capacity to be enjoyed completely.
Note that none of this is specific to books. Shows, movies, (solo) games. They're all about something. The point of instagram reel is being about nothing at all. Watching it to fill your head with void. A silent, temporary death. "Psychological obliteration" is particularly apt here.
It's a different sort of 'passive'. There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network which 'lights up' in very different ways, depending on what you do, and how. One could argue that is to be expected, because different regions of the brain are exercised. But that's not all of it. Regarding exercise, think of 'Use it, or lose it'. It's mostly the imagination which is exercised while reading. If it isn't, it shrivels.
I wouldn’t consider reading as a passive consumption. You have to 1. Lead and follow a tempo, essentially moving your eyes at the speed of you thought 2. Using imagination to associate what you read with other knowledges.
TV and ticktock don’t need 1. You can interact with a remote or you scrolling-thumb but interaction is not required to consume.
2. Isn’t a necessity neither but people do use TV, ticktock or music to "empty their mind" by thinking to nothing else but the consumption flow. You can do that with reading, but that’s not an experience people usually like and they come back to the place their mind left.
Number two but in book form is "beach reads" which can include your favorite trash romance or the latest "dad book" Vince Flynn / Clive Cussler / Tom Clancy thing. And given the huge popularity of the two genres folks are reaching for books to turn off plenty.
>But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
Cervantes, 1605:
>In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it...
This is essentially Neil Postman's argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death [0]. The basic idea is that the medium matters, and different media are better suited to different types of messages and discourse. This is why I rail against social media--in particular things like Twitter/X and Bluesky, because their basic structure leads to poor communication outcomes.
It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.
> When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed.
I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.
Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.
Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.
But then you have people like my one friend, who is scrolling non-stop literally from waking to sleep. It's hard to even have a 3 sentence conversation as he's constantly elsewhere.
pretty optimistic review of the power of the individual/mind contra the really fine-tuned algorithms of engagement. the hook is the “filling bits of (idle) time.” the accounting when all the filling of bits of time is done seems to add up to a huge sum. the extra time definitely would have been borrowed (read: stolen) from somewhere.
I agree that algorithmic feeds and even just having endless distractions in a hip pocket are terribly unhealthy. I thinks its wise to be very mindful with both and that they can quietly steal from other experiences that one might prefer in hindsight.
But I don't have a way to square that perspective with what the original commenter suggested about "psychological obliteration" and "addiction akin to gambling or heroin"
People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions. They're clearly not consuming or addictive in the same way as those others things, where people often make explicit wantonly destructive choices in service to their addiction.
And realistically, that they're a different kind of risk with a different kind of impact may make them even more dangerous from a health-of-society perspective, because we don't have great cultural insight or hygeine practices to deal with them. If we want to change that, we need to recognize that they don't represent the same danger we're used to.
So I'm not dismissing that they're bad. I'm just dismissing the original commenters' deeply strained and distracting characterization.
> People won't even pay for most of these pocket distractions
If someone is paying, the transaction, by construction reinforces the psychological boundaries that obliteration eliminates. So I think not paying is part of it, just like addicts ignore the (perhaps partially non monetary) price of their behavior.
I think this is a very salient point, namely the danger of passive consumption is the losing the sense of oneself. We can be become so absorbed by the objects of our attention that we forget ourselves and this has very real consequences both on of physiology but also our psychology. So part of the solution is to "remember yourself" while you're consuming or directing your attention towards any object, so you are the subject and you are attending to an object. The last piece of the puzzle is that both you, the subject, and the object of your attention are located in space, so location/context is the third essential aspect of the experience to internalize for proper harmony, as far as I understand it.
I didn't see Andy Farnell's "Digital Self-Defense" mentioned, but I think it's relevant here -- analogous to how one should be cognizant of personal safety when navigating a city (or even while crossing a busy intersection).
Nay, even commenting is often pointless. HN likes to overly articulate drivel more often than not. Indeed, even this very comment is pointless, because what does it really add but another section in another chain of pointless drivel? Socializing is human. Any and all communication platforms like forums, or even Twitter, work to capitalize on the needless want to contribute something. Which is often unnecessary. I'd argue that lurking is often the smarter choice.
Not that books are exempt from the same problem. Many of them are pointless or suck too, but that's just part of living in a flawed world.
At least to me, reading is much more an "active" task. It takes effort to read that extra paragraph. My eyes are closing or wandering around. My hands are tempted to close the book and do something else, even if it's a book I like!
It's (quite ironically!) an artifact of the social media culture itself: the shift towards increasingly unmoored, extreme language, disproportionate to whatever thing it's in response to. The effect of echo chambers both winding people up in agitation spirals, while tuning out influences that'd tend to tamp down the intensity.
"I wasted a few hours watching stupid videos and feel regretful about that" != "YouTube obliterated my soul!"
Eh, sorry if this wasn't clear, but obliteration is intended to have a specific meaning in my post. I'll clarify here.
Obliteration is like when "you," your conception of "your self" as an entity in the world ceases to exist. Like your internal thoughts turning off, minutes turning into hours, lack of awareness of your surroundings. If you've ever been to a casino or seen someone with a bad drinking problem, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Alternately (!), if you've ever seen someone in a pro tennis match, grandmaster chess tournament, (or as other commenters are rightly pointing out -- reading a really good book!) it's kinda like that too.
However, those productive activities are different for the soul in a way that I have trouble articulating.
I emphatically am not intending it as just like "thing that's really really bad."
I don't think it's unmoored or disproportionate at all, actually. Look at someone who is really locked in on one of these apps. Or do a search for social media addiction, that stuff really does wreck people's lives and is bad for the soul. A wide body of psychological research supports this. I am sharing what I have noticed and trying to understand what the causal mechanism is.
I think the delivery might be sensational but I agree with the sentiment. Especially since you acknowledge that it isn't purely harmful. Normally I don't watch short form video but occasionally I do and I do feel it's a somewhat different state of mind. I would be worried about myself if I found it happening often.
I think it’s pretty clear the GP (and others) believe this is pseudopsychology bunk supported by neither any available evidence nor by professionals in the field.
It takes 1,000x less time and energy to come up with a pet theory de novo and sans any evidence than it takes to debunk. Without backing evidence provided for an idea, it should be as easy to dismiss out of hand as it was to create it in the first place.
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.