Have Americans become disconnected from reality? Lately, it’s a valid question, and not only when it comes to their perceptions of the economy which, as other commentators have pointed out, frequently bear a tenuous relationship to the facts. Speaking broadly, the types of media Americans consume and the volume of their media consumption suggest a nation steeped in escapism and fanciful thinking.
It’s possible to make an argument that adult Americans, along with residents of other wealthy countries (i.e. EU member states, Japan, Korea) are mentally disconnected from reality in ways that their ancestors would have found astonishing and possibly horrifying.
New forms of technology and a surge in content creation made possible by motion pictures, television, and social media — all super-charged by the World Wide Web — are driving these changes. What’s less appreciated is where this upsurge in ‘screen time’ is taking us over the longer term. Americans’ misperceptions of the national situation and the effects on their behavior of exposure to so much manufactured content can only be surmised, but are unlikely to be wholly good.
A CULTURE OF ISOLATION AND DISTRACTION
People living in the advanced economies no longer interact with nature or each other in the way their ancestors did a mere three generations ago – a blink of an eye in human history. People live separately and often alone. Television and other on-screen entertainment are becoming substitutes for human contact. Buffered from physical discomfort by painkillers and the worst impacts of the natural elements by the built landscape, peoples’ minds are free to wander fancifully even is their working lives require them to focus on highly abstract tasks.
In Greymantle’s view, it is the innate human hunger for fancy and diversion that are stoking the creation of more entertainment of both the high-end and low-end variety focused on the strange and the trivial, the implausible and the fantastic. Consuming a virtual ‘diet of illusion’, the mind of the contemporary man or woman starts to lose touch with facts and common understandings of the world that have long been taken for granted. This trend begins to have social and political implications.
WHAT THE ‘DIET OF ILLUSION’ IS, AND IS NOT
After reading the above, frequent readers of this blog may be tempted to say: ‘Oh God, he’s going on another didactic detour! Better navigate to another site before he gets too deep into the weeds’.
My response is: ‘Please don’t worry. I’m not making scholarly arguments here. I’m going to make a few common sense observations supported by publicly-available data and tell you what I think it means.’
This blog is not an academic journal. It’s meant to be light reading for people interested in current events. We talk about the Big Issues here, but do so in an accessible manner.
For the purpose of brevity, then, let me to summarize my argument as follows:
- Americans are spending more time on screens than ever before, and the content of what they consume is changing in ways both overt and subtle.
- The demise of many regional newspapers and popular periodicals, which are being replaced by social media and websites curated by ‘influencers’, is accelerating the drive away from fact-based, informative reporting toward opinion-driven reporting, which holds to lower standards.
- Tastes in entertainment have shifted toward overtly fantastical situations and away from narratives grounded in a commonly understood reality, by which term I mean an understanding of reality that involves physical limits, pain, death, and the consequences of actions. Even when pain and suffering are present, these experiences are often distorted by the fantastic surroundings in which the stories take place.
- Even among the so-called ‘reading public’, genres that are heavily based on fanciful settings and dramatic outcomes account for a large share of artistic production and profits. Romances, mysteries and ghost stories have always been popular, but the sheer volume of such stories has reached incredible proportions.
The effect of these trends in aggregate is what I am dubbing ‘the diet of illusion’. It means the consistent consumption of opinion over facts, fanciful narratives over grounded narratives, and images and sounds over words. It can also be defined as living under conditions of constant exposure to high-end special effects, ‘reality television’ situations, video games, bespoke content of uncertain origin and veracity (including those generated by AI), and ubiquitous pornography.
It must be said that citizens of economically advanced countries consume a sensory diet of this kind by choice. Content creators now include everything from multi-billion dollar entertainment giants such as Disney to lone entrepreneurs on TikTok, but the cumulative effect is the same: the mind of a human being is constantly bombarded with streams of fantastical content that people first crave as a diversion, but then begin to view as a normal and, eventually, as an indispensable aid to daily life.
This is what I mean by the phrase ‘diet of illusion’.
It is not meant to imply that some nefarious cabal of global elites have created a master plan to enslave the world’s population through the creation of an online diet of bread and circuses. There is no Svengali out there casting a spell over the world. The population wants its bread. The people want their circuses. In fact, they demand them.
Individuals are hard at work on YouTube creating bespoke entertainment of every conceivable variety, and their fellow citizens are gobbling it up.
This is not to say that the motivations of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, the board of directors of Google or the inventors of PornHub are without some degree of malign intent. In fact, Greymantle sees malign intent everywhere. What they lack is meta-coordination. For content creators, the common motive is chiefly the profit motive. For content consumers, the common motivation is pleasure.
The problem then becomes: how much content/pleasure is too much? And what are the long-term effects on people of being constantly bombarded with so much fantasy?
SCREEN TIME NATION
Let’s browse through a few recent statistics on screen use, shall we?
According to a broad cross-section of data by media research companies, including Statista and DataReportal, American adults spend an average of 7 hours per day looking at screens, be they computer screens, television screens, or their Smart Phones. Adults in the Gen Z cohort aged between 25 and 45 years of age spend an average of 9 hours daily on screens. Approximately 50% of children as young as 2 years old in the Gen Y cohort spend some time each day interacting with a screen device.
Americans are not even the world’s most prolific screen users. Adults and adolescents in Africa, Asia and Latin America spend as much, or more, time on screens as their U.S. counterparts. South Africans, for example, spend roughly 10 hours and 45 minutes a day on screens, most of it on their smart phones. The ‘diet of illusion’ is clearly a global condition in 2024.
For Americans, the 7-odd hours of screen time in 2024 represents an increase of two hours compared to 1959, when the average American family watched television – either alone, in sub-groups or as a complete family – for five hours per day.
A two-hour increase across 65 years does not necessarily seem very alarming at first. After all, the invention of the Internet and the Smart Phone makes the expansion of screen use completely understandable. However, there’s a twist.
Whereas the American family of 1959 were usually glued to a single screen in the living room, the American family of 2024 are typically engaged on separate screens, and sometimes engaged entirely on their own with several screens at once.
I often find my 13-year old on his iPhone while watching television, attempting to divide his attention between sending text messages and watching streamed reruns of ‘The Office’ or ‘All American’. It’s a house rule that one should be engaged with only a single screen at a time, but our kids frequently break that rule, and my wife and I sometimes find ourselves breaking it, too.
With so many screens at our disposal, it’s tough to avoid being distracted by what’s happening on any one of them. Our phones ping constantly with one alert or another. It’s tempting to put on the TV while performing routine tasks (particularly when home alone). Our computer screens are likewise buzzing constantly with alerts, advertisements or the subtle and constant temptation to ‘Web surf’.
MULTI-MODAL LORDS OF DISTRACTION
The plenitude of screens is only one dimension of the new sensory reality, however. Another dimension consists of the variety of visual platforms. You’ve got television, both live and streamed, and then you have movies on the television or your computer. You can now watch TV on your smartphone, of course. I recently saw a man watching ancient episodes of the 1960s sitcom ‘Hogan’s Heroes‘ on his phone while commuting under the Hudson River at 7:30 in the morning.
The later half of the 2000s decade brought us social media, and social media is what consumes nearly one-third of Americans’ screen time. Of the 7 hours that Americans, on average, spent on screens in 2023, nearly 2.5 hours was spent on social media. Facebook and TickTock were tied at 2 hours and 45 minutes average daily usage by subscribers. YouTube and Tumblr are only slightly less popular (addictive?) at about 2 hours and 35 minutes average use per day.
American children spend an average of one hour per day on YouTube, totaling approximately 15 days per year on the social media application. And they also watch about four hours of television a day.
There is an argument to be made – and I’m sure that someone, somewhere has made it – that the attraction to, and the benefits of, social media derive from its interactive and connective nature. When Americans were watching five hours of TV a day in the late 1950s and 60s, they weren’t connecting with other people, but disconnecting themselves from the social world.
When Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr were launched in the mid-2000s, the pitch made by their creators was that social media would facilitate and improve social connections between people, potentially playing a constructive role in reversing some of the social disconnection that occurred between the 1960s and the 1990s.
Social media certainly has facilitated connections between people with like-minded beliefs and shared interests. However, the social science data for the past twenty years is pretty unambiguous in showing us a world in which vital emotional and social connections have eroded, rather than been strengthened by the iPhone and social media. As MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, author of the 2012 book ‘Alone Together’ accurately and presciently observed five years after the iPhone’s launch, social media is also corroding the relationships between intimate partners and members of nuclear families.
A large part of social media’s ill effects stem from its use as a conduit for rumor, gossip and outrage. Social media users do share news items and pass along the occasional fact, but more generally they platforms share opinions, both founded and unfounded, and react to events or even to non-events, which is to say, to events of dubious significance (e.g. the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance). Social media is driven by opinion and attention-seeking, not by information.
NEWSROOMS IN RETREAT, ALGORITHMS ON THE ADVANCE
The proliferation of social media platforms, cable television, and novel news websites since the year 2000 has accelerated, and probably played a large role in spurring, the decline of traditional news media, most particularly regional newspapers. Americans relied on regional newspapers for much for their information gathering in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The closure of many local papers in the past 25 years, a trend that has received much attention from the remaining major news outlets, has deprived Americans of a go-to source of basic facts, shared information, and social trust. Local and regional papers could be staid and boring, but they kept social reality moored in a relatively safe harbor of commonly-held realities and assumptions. Writing at these papers was also governed by a rigorous set of journalistic standards, which were strictly enforced.
The proliferation of news websites like The Daily Wire, The Daily Caller, and The Blaze on the conservative side and The Daily Beast, Vice and The Huffington Post on the liberal side, all of which offer some mix of print and broadcast journalism, hasn’t by itself eviscerated journalistic standards. These publications do still respond to current events and report on ongoing news stories.
The problem with all of them is that they are so opinion-driven that the facts tend to get lost in streams of invective and breathless outrage. The biases of these publications are so intense that any meaningful context quickly gets lost in favor of outrage. Like social media, they are essentially algorithm-driven, responding in real time to the emotional responses of their audience picked up technologically.
DISCOVERING OUR ‘INNER CHILD’
Thusly the news media.
Cinematic entertainment is a slightly different kettle of fish. It has its biases, but the important thing to know about the evolution of motion pictures since the 1970s is that the types of stories favored by audiences have changed dramatically. To say that popular sensibilities have undergone a seismic shift fails to capture the magnitude of the change. In a nutshell, hard-boiled detectives, family dramas and war movies have given way to a mix of superheroes and magicians.
Based on box office data, the shift away from traditional narratives toward the purely imaginative proceeded in two major phases. The first phase occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the second around the year 2000.
The first phase coincided with the ascent of the Baby Boomer generation to positions of influence in the film and publishing industries in the 1977-83 period. The second phase straddled the turn of the century and reflected two major trends: the use of the Internet by working-age Americans and the expansion of Young Adult (YA) literature, of which J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter‘ series became cultural touchstones. The popularity of YA literature translated into hit film series that included the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise, the ‘Twilight’ and ‘Hunger Games’ franchises, and many other, albeit less notable films.
A SEA CHANGE IN SENSIBILITIES
During the first phase of the shift to fantasy in the early 1980s, Hollywood played the leading role in re-shaping cultural tastes. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Robert Zemekis re-defined the matinee ‘blockbuster’ and reframed contemporary sensibilities to focus primarily on adolescent dreams and desires, a marked change from the gritty, adult sensibility embraced by directors of the early 1970s.
Consider the Top 20 grossing films at the American box office during the 1980s:
- E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
- Batman
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
- Back to the Future
- Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Rain Man
- Top Gun
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
- Back to the Future, Part 2
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
- Crocodile Dundee
- Fatal Attraction
- Beverly Hills Cop
- Rocky IV
- Rambo: First Blood, Part 2
- Beverly Hills Cop II
- Look Who’s Talking
- Coming to America
Note that the seven highest-grossing films included four that plausibly fall into the science fiction genre (including the comical ‘Back to the Future’), two pulp-adventure narratives (the first and second ‘Indiana Jones’ films) and one superhero picture. The remainder of the list includes more from the ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘Back to the Future’ franchises, a live-cartoon mix, and two of the ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ series of action-comedies starring Eddie Murphy. A common element to all is fantasy.
Now consider the Top 20 Grossing Films of the 1970s –
- Star Wars
- Jaws
- The Exorcist
- Enter the Dragon
- Grease
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Superman
- Smoky and the Bandit
- The Godfather
- Saturday Night Fever
- The Sting
- Animal House
- Moonraker
- Blazing Saddles
- Rocky
- Jaws 2
- American Graffiti
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- The Towering Inferno
- Kramer versus Kramer
It’s immediately evident that high-concept science fiction and fantasy films dominated the top 20 of the 1980s, whereas the top-grossing films of the 1970s included musicals, gritty dramas, zany comedy (e.g. ‘Blazing Saddles’) and fairly realistic horror movies (e.g. ‘Jaws’ and ‘Jaws 2’) versus the flights of fancy that dominated the 1980s.
Comparing the 20 Top Grossing U.S. films of the 1960s to the same list for the 2010s is even more instructive. First, take the 1960s:
- The Sound of Music
- The Graduate
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
- The Jungle Book
- My Fair Lady
- Thunderball
- Cleopatra
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
- How the West Was Won
- It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
- Funny Girl
- The Love Bug
- Goldfinger
- Bonny and Clyde
- The Dirty Dozen
- Laurence of Arabia
- Midnight Cowboy
- The Odd Couple
- Valley of the Dolls
And now, the 20 Top Grossing U.S Films of the 2010s:
- Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
- Avengers: Endgame
- Black Panther
- Avengers: Infinity War
- Jurassic World
- Marvel’s The Avengers
- Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
- Incredibles 2
- The Lion King
- Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
- Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker
- Beauty and the Beast
- Finding Dory
- Frozen II
- Avengers: Age of Ultron
- The Dark Knight Rises
- Two Story 4
- Captain Marvel
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Again, it’s not hard to spot the pattern here. High-concept fantasy and science fiction stories (and most of the sci-fi stories could be more accurately categorized as fantasy) dominated the box office and streaming platforms of the 2010s, along with animated films and superhero epics. Big budget franchises were in, and serious dramas of the ‘Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner?’, ‘Laurence of Arabia’ and ‘Kramer Versus Kramer’ mold were decidedly out.
THE SAME OLD SCHMALTZ, OR A PERMANENT REVOLUTION?
There’s always been a lot of schmaltz and spectacle in the movies, of course, even from its early days. But it’s hard to see how gritty dramas, screwball comedies and musicals can ever make a comeback after four decades of big budget special-effects extravaganzas.
The fact that children and adults pack the cinemas to watch these films when they are released is not even the most salient fact. Perhaps the most revolutionary change since the advent of the streaming services and cable channels devoted to showing films is that children and adults alike have developed a tendency to Binge Watch hit films and TV shows over and over again at the expense of novel content.
My sons and their friends have watched each of the ‘Star Wars’, ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Avengers’ franchise movies dozens of times. These films are what they choose to put on when they’re bored and have nothing else (or decline to find something else) to do. It’s a sea change from the days before cable and even video cassette recorders, when re-watching films that had left the theaters was a challenge.
People had to be content to watch whatever the major networks put on afternoon television, which were often decades-old movies, the broadcast rights for which were cheaper for TV networks to purchase. This is how Greymantle first saw ‘Spartacus‘, ‘White Heat’, ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, ‘The Quiet Man’, ‘The Lion in Winter‘, ‘A Man for All Seasons‘, ‘The Longest Day’ and ‘The Graduate’.
Watching replays of those films on television in the mid-1980s was to catch a glimpse of another time and of sensibilities that were already starting to seem antiquated. But they did provide a rough school of history, in a sense, given that they both depicted and humanized historical figures in a way that was accessible to a schoolboy.
The market structure of the entertainment industry and the value of broadcasting rights have moved on, alas. As have, apparently, any sense of cultural mission held by the major broadcasting organs, aside from promoting the widespread cultural progressivism of the 2020s.
Perhaps serious films have moved to the ‘small screen’ due to the rise of prestige television and the streaming services. There’s certainly evidence for that theory. But there’s also evidence that the fantastic has extended its rule to the small screen, as well. Case in point: the immense popularity of ‘Game of Thrones’ and the ‘Blumhouse’ horror film series on the streaming platforms.
As a result, it’s superheroes, fantasy and horror 24 hours a day for my kids’ generation.
EVEN IN PRINT, FANTASY SELLS
If you take a step back from changing tastes in motion pictures, you’ll find that the situation in print media isn’t much better. If you’re over 40 and have enjoyed browsing bookstore shelves since you were a child, you might be struck by the impression that the Young Adult (YA) and Thriller sections have expanded since the 1980s at the expense of Fiction and Classics. Broadly-speaking, you’d be right, with the exception of History, which has held up surprisingly well.
According to Statista, a leading data aggregation and publishing site, 41% of Americans reported reading books focused on history in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Mysteries and biographies were the second and third most popular genres, with 40% and 38% of respondents reporting they had such books in the past year. Romance came in fourth at 30%, science fiction fifth at 23% and fantasy in seventh place at 21%.
Readership statistics don’t capture the relative power of the genres, however. To gauge this, Statista publishes profitability data. In 2022, books classified as Romance or Erotica (think, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’), were the most profitable with $1.44 billion of annual revenues. Crime & Mystery were a distant second with at $740 million, with Religion & Spirituality nipping at their heels with $720 million in sales.
The three aforementioned genres are the industry leaders. Bringing up the rear behind Religion & Spirituality are Science Fiction and Fantasy with $590 million in sales. Horror, in fifth place with $79 million in annual sales, leads all remaining genres. By sales and profitability, History, Biographies, Current Affairs, and Politics are in the dust compared to the industry leaders.
As recently as the 1970s, sales of fiction not classified as science fiction or fantasy far outstripped what were considered disreputable ‘niche’ genres. Horror was barely in the top ten. Westerns occupied a notable place on popular reading lists from the 1880s until the late 1960s. Comedic and satirical works such as Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Breakfast of Champions‘ were also major bestsellers.
When did the shift in tastes toward the erotic and the fantastic occur? And, why did it happen?
FROM RITUAL TO COSPLAY: OUR PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE
Similar to what occurred in the motion picture industry between the late 1970s and the end of the 1980s, Greymantle would argue that the Baby Boomers’ embrace of the adolescent sensibility, coupled with their refusal to relinquish it at any age, explains much of what has followed since the mid-1970s. The rise of the YA novel, perhaps best exemplified by the work of Judy Blume, dates from this period.
Mixed with the Sexual Revolution and the expansion of ‘youth culture’ during the heyday of rock music, the overall effect, Greymantle believes, was the dissemination of an attitude that adolescence represents the high point of human life, and letting go of it is tantamount to ‘selling out’.
Childhood and adolescence came to be idealized, and the more mature sensibilities of the first half of the 20th century were shed. A new mindset arose that embraced the pushing of boundaries, a desire to shock the audience (out of their bourgeois complacency, of course), and an urgent wish to break the limits of what could be shown on the screen through the embrace of new technologies (i.e. the Special Effects Revolution).
The first ‘Jurassic Park’ film released in 1993 inaugurated an accelerated expansion of digital effects in motion pictures. After 1993, literally anything that could be imagined by a screenwriter could find its way on-screen. The subsequent integration of high-budget film series into theme park rides and exhibits in the 2000s and 2010s then began to merge the Special Effects Revolution with lived experience. Families on vacation to Disney World now don Hogwarts School robes to roam the ‘Harry Potter’ experience, reenacting scenes from the books and films in real time.
The proliferation of ‘cosplay‘ of this type might be regarding as representing a new and more serious stage in the merging of shared fictional universes (e.g. ‘Star Wars’, ‘Star Trek’, ‘Lord of the Rings’) with actual life via periodic reenactments of core fictional passages that in some ways resemble religious pilgrimages and celebrations.
Perhaps immersive forms of entertainment are becoming similar to religion. Both are arguably forms of escapism – at least to the skeptical-minded. The question then becomes: If the citizens of ‘advanced’ societies who feel they have no need for organized religion or its rules and constraints delve ever-deeper into elaborate cosplay, then what does this say about their ‘escape’ from the older traditions?
Perhaps they are exchanging one fiction for another. Or maybe they’re exchanging an esoteric truth for an elaborate fantasy.
Where does it all go to next? One can only imagine.
I have observed, however, that people who are out of touch with reality are often easily led.
Until next time, I remain —
Greymantle
