Books…Something to Listen to While Doing Laundry!

Over the past few years, many PR people have told me: “Nobody reads anymore. Everything is video now!” 

I was reminded of their admonitions when reading Derek Thompson’s brilliant Substack piece, Everything is Television. In it, he points out that social media has become television. Podcasts are becoming television, with video viewing on YouTube far surpassing audio only and video podcasts tripling on Spotify. And now, AI is generating endless streams of video. 

Everything that isn't already television is desperately trying to become television. The marble, as Thompson puts it, is spinning toward the bottom of the bowl.

Not only that, but many people watch “screen on screen.” For example, they have a show running in the background while they play a videogame in the foreground.

I found this line from Thompson’s article particularly chilling: Netflix now instructs screenwriters to have characters announce what they're doing so that viewers can follow the plot more easily while also doing laundry, cooking dinner, or scrolling through TikTok videos on their phones. The media giant literally has a genre called “casual viewing”—content designed to be half-watched. 

The scary part, Thompson says, is that this trend towards endless streaming is directly correlated with the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in today’s world. And the growing political divide, as well. Eek.

Anyway, back to the topic of this newsletter: What does all this mean for books? 

Books require what Thompson calls “inwardness.” This is the capacity for sustained attention, allowing meaning to penetrate rather than drift past you. When you write a book, generally speaking, you're not creating content to flow past someone's eyeballs. Your reader can't half-read your memoir while watching TikTok. They have to choose to be present with your words.

That said, audiobooks are rising rapidly in popularity. And I’ll admit it: I listen to audiobooks while driving and grocery shopping. Not fiction, but nonfiction/self-help stuff that I want to ingest but don’t feel I need to fully absorb. 

So, what next?

I firmly believe that there will always be readers who want to get lost in books, as I do when I pick up a novel at night. We authors are guardians of something increasingly rare: the deep dive, the sustained argument, the story that unfolds over hours not seconds. 

But we also need to be conscious of the world we live in. We need to create audiobooks people can listen while they drive. We need to restate our main points over and over again: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them what you told them.” And to market our books, we might need to show our faces on camera sometimes. Even on TikTok.

All that said, I’m grateful that our books are not television. One of the greatest gifts of books, IMHO, is that they require our deep attention and foster creative thinking about complex ideas. They’re not competing with television, but offering an escape from it.

What do you think? How are you protecting the "inwardness"? Hit Reply and tell me how you're navigating this world.

Aloha, 

MeiMei

TIP OF THE WEEK:

Create Your Own Attractor

Thompson writes that television is the “attractor” all media is drawn toward.

How can you create your own gravitational pull to reading? Here are some ideas:

• Set up a reading ritual, such as lighting a candle before opening a book
• Join a book club
• Look for books that include reflection questions at the end of chapters
• Journal about books you’re reading