“The world is flat!” So claim the conspiracy theorists.

Don’t worry, this isn’t an endorsement of the unorthodox opinions about the shape of our planet espoused by people like Kyrie Irving.  My feet are planted firmly in the “world is round” camp of Columbus and science.

But while the shape of the planet is round, I do subscribe to the view that our world has grown increasingly flat.  By that I mean that too many of us are living disturbing amounts of our lives through a screen.

According to multiple research studies, Americans spend anywhere from 7 to 10 hours a day staring at a phone, computer, tablet, or television.  Think about it – that means we spend most of our waking hours experiencing the world two-dimensionally.  Screens provide length and breadth, with stunning picture quality, but there’s no depth.  We are butterflies skipping along the water, never getting beyond the surface.

Is it any wonder many of us complain about the lack of meaningful connections in our lives?

When I was growing up, parents used to worry about kids watching too much television.  Video games were in their infancy (yes, I know, I’m old).  I remember getting in trouble when my mom discovered that I blew off my homework and, instead, spent the entire afternoon after school watching reruns of Hawaii Five-0, Barnaby Jones, and Banacek on Channel 11.  (Now I’m really dating myself.)

Believe me, I appreciate the irony of someone like me who has made a career in television and media lamenting about excessive screen time.  When I’m done writing this post, I will go back to my day job of creating television shows that I hope many people will sit down and watch.

All the same, my experience seems quaint compared to today’s world.  Perhaps because of my chosen profession, I’m less concerned about television usage.  Not that I recommend kids ignoring their homework so they can binge reruns on Netflix.  But, to me, there is a meaningful distinction between lean-back forms of entertainment like television or movies versus the immersive and the addictive world of social media.

Again, back to the research, time spent by Gen Z on social media is more than 4 hours a day.  That’s a lot of life experienced only in two dimensions; flat.  I wrote recently that we should kick kids off social media.  It’s critical during our formative years that we spend as much time as possible experiencing life fully, three dimensionally.  Not to mention that so much of social media is an unregulated cesspool that’s just downright dangerous for kids.

But I’m not here to rant about kids and social media again.  Living in a flat world is a problem for adults too.

The social media companies have become incredibly adept at serving us the right content to keep us engaged.  One of the key reasons for their success is the migration of these platforms to video.    TikTok quickly became king of the social media hill because its ingenious algorithms know exactly the types of videos we like to watch.  It’s all about getting us to watch another, and then another, and so on.

Remember when Facebook and Instagram were just words and photos scrolled in chronological order?  Just like my days of watching Hawaii Five-0 reruns on Channel 11, it seems so quaint.

I want to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with short form video.  There’s a lot of great stuff out there, made by talented, generous people seeking to entertain and inform.  But beyond the explicit intention of these companies to turn us into addicts, it has created a situation where we give too much attention, and perhaps too much credit, to people who are good at making videos.

Just because someone is a skilled editor and videographer doesn’t mean they are the best source of advice or guidance on a particular topic.  It’s important to remember your favorite influencers got popular not necessarily because they were the most accomplished in their fields, but because they mastered short form video production.

Don’t misunderstand, this is not a knock on the many talented, well-intentioned people who have emerged as influencers on social media. I follow a number of them myself.  Candidly having a couple million followers on TikTok or Instagram would help me sell a lot more books.  And, of course, one could credibly argue that the buyer should beware before taking advice from bloggers or writers.

For the record, it’s not lost on me that my laments about social media usage sound eerily like complaints about TV, rock music, and the automobile from other eras.  It’s quite possible someone will read this post ten or twenty years from now and have a good laugh.  But I doubt it. 

The scale of social media is impossible to ignore.  It now consumes so much of our time and the algorithms that drive these platforms will only continue to exacerbate the problem.  The net result is that we live an increasingly disturbing amount of our lives in a world with no depth that disproportionately rewards a certain skill set.

There is no putting the genie back in the bottle.  Other than keeping it away from our kids I’m not suggesting we can or should turn back the clock on social media.  What we need is a reckoning as an industry about the negative downstream impacts on our society from excessive social media usage.  The entire ecosystem – media companies, advertisers, agencies, and content creators – needs to come together to find solutions.  

Technology has changed so much of our lives.  However, we as human beings haven’t changed that much.  We are hard-wired for depth; a flat world will never be enough.