Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.
David Foster Wallace, in an interview with writer David Lipsky that eventually became the book “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”.
Is it weird that the first thing I thought of when I read this was the new Facebook changes? DFW goes on to say:
The technology’s gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it’s amoral.
It doesn’t…have a responsibility to care about us one whit more than it does: It’s got a job to do. The moral job is ours. You know, Why am I watching five hours a day of this? I mean, why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean, that’s something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we’re postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we’re supposed to have grown up.
On a related note, here’s a recent chart from Business Insider that showed that users spent ~54 billion minutes on Facebook in May:
