Trapped by a picture? Tracing video media as a substitute for social life and leisure in North America and the UK

In this article, we reevaluate the social legacy of edited video media as a technology. We employ Winner’s (2020) concept of technologies as forms of life and apply it to what we term TV+. TV+ describes a continuity of media form from the earliest cinema to contemporary TikTok reels. In particular, we trace the history of TV+ and leisure as they have co-evolved over the last century in North America and the UK. We explore the capacity of TV+ to substitute for social interaction and capture attention involuntarily. We then contextualize TV+ within the development of mass leisure and recreation culture in the twentieth century, which TV+ then began to replace. Integrating these findings with Putnam’s Bowling Alone, we extend his arguments on television to capture contemporary media habits and contemporary forms of social isolation. We argue that TV+ may be socially corrosive not merely because it deskills individuals, but because it produces a larger structural effect, lowering the available opportunities for recreation and leisure outside of TV+.