Nobody Knows How to Hang Out Anymore Without Documenting It

Eleanna Liaskou

1 day ago

4 min read

Everything is TV now, and it might be one of the reasons we are living through a community recession.

In his 2025 essay on the “anti-social century,” journalist Derek Thompson observed something strange about modern media: despite the internet once promising an endless variety of formats, almost every form of media seems to be evolving towards the same destination: a continuous flow of episodic video. The platforms may still have different names, but increasingly, they want us to do the same thing on all of them: sit back, watch and keep watching.

Think about how Instagram has changed. Only a small fraction of the time we spend on the platform now involves consuming content from people we actually know. A space originally built around seeing what your friends were doing has gradually become an entertainment network populated by strangers. Open the app and you are far more likely to encounter a creator making a storytime, a stranger’s morning routine or a clip designed specifically for your algorithm than a photograph from someone you had dinner with last week.

Other forms of media are moving in the same direction. Podcasts, once defined by the fact that they were audio, increasingly come with cameras, sets and clips engineered for social media. Streaming services that were supposed to liberate us from traditional television have introduced advertising tiers that look increasingly familiar to anyone who remembers cable.

The internet did not kill television. Television quietly absorbed the internet.

When Your Life Becomes the Show

The transformation becomes more interesting when it moves beyond the screen. Influencer culture now operates remarkably like reality television. Friend groups go on holiday together while millions follow their friendships through Stories, vlogs and TikToks. Romantic relationships unfold episodically, complete with soft launches, breakups and public explanations. Everyday routines become recurring formats. Even seemingly mundane experiences are packaged into narratives with characters, conflicts and resolutions.

But TV did not simply consume every other medium. Its logic began consuming our behaviour too.

We increasingly perform connection instead of simply experiencing it. We post to demonstrate that something happened. We turn birthdays, dinners and holidays into content while they are still taking place. The language of television has even entered the way we understand ourselves: people casually describe themselves as the “main character”, talk about entering a new “era” or interpret an inconvenient encounter as part of their personal plot.

None of these phrases is particularly sinister on its own. Together, though, they reveal a subtle shift in perspective. A life can begin to feel less like something being lived and more like something being watched.

And once you start imagining an audience, other people can quietly become part of the production. Friends become supporting characters. Relationships acquire storylines. Experiences become valuable partly because of how well they can be communicated afterwards.

The distinction between having a life and producing one becomes increasingly difficult to see.

The Broadcast-First Economy

This would matter less if television logic stayed within entertainment. Instead, it has become one of the dominant ways culture rewards attention.

We are living in what could be described as a broadcast-first economy, where visibility is often treated as evidence of relevance. In that environment, subtlety has a structural disadvantage. Outrage travels faster than uncertainty. Exaggeration makes a better headline than proportion. Conflict gives an audience a reason to return tomorrow.

You can see the incentives everywhere. Brands manufacture controversies because backlash can generate enormous visibility. Creators compress complicated subjects into absolute positions because nuance rarely fits neatly into a viral clip. Ordinary disagreements become content, and private conflicts acquire audiences that feel entitled to choose sides.

Even culture itself is increasingly created with its eventual circulation in mind. Writers know which sentences can become screenshots. Artists understand which images will photograph well. Musicians know which section of a song might become a fifteen-second sound. The question is no longer only whether something is meaningful, beautiful or interesting, but whether it can travel.

The problem is not that artists want audiences. Art has always needed them. The difference is that the audience is beginning to shape the work before the work exists.

When everything must become a take, a clip or a storyline, complexity becomes inconvenient. There is little room to sit with two contradictory ideas, to change your mind slowly or to understand someone without immediately deciding whether they are right or wrong. Yet those are precisely the skills that relationships require.

We Were Never Supposed to Be the Audience

Community has always depended on things that television cannot easily provide: trust, empathy, patience and active participation.

A community asks something from you. You have to call someone without having content to send them. You have to listen to stories that are not particularly entertaining. You have to show up when there is nothing photogenic about showing up. Sometimes you have to spend an evening with people you love without producing evidence that the evening happened.

That is fundamentally different from being an audience.

We have more opportunities to observe other people than any generation before us, yet observation is not participation. Knowing what someone ate, where they travelled or what they wore this weekend can create the sensation of closeness without requiring the behaviours that actually create intimacy.

Perhaps this is part of the strange contradiction of modern connection: we can see everyone, yet increasingly struggle to feel part of something.

Television taught us how to watch. The internet gave everyone a channel. Social media handed us an audience, or at least the possibility of one. Somewhere along the way, the habits of spectatorship escaped the screen and entered everyday life.

The community recession is not simply happening because we spend too much time online. It is happening because we have absorbed the logic of the screen into the way we relate to one another. Everything became television. The risk is that we did too.