Zap! What Television Programmers Invented and Silicon Valley Perfected – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 examined the five-century history of media moral panics and why the smartphone debate fits that template imperfectly. Part 3 will look at what a US jury found that the science could not yet prove. 

The accusation at the centre of the heavily publicised lawsuit against Meta and Google is that their platforms were deliberately engineered to be addictive, that this was known internally, and that children were among the targets. That accusation was deemed correct by a jury in the US.

This drive to create a form addiction is not new to platforms or even the Internet. The engineering logic behind infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic personalisation is not a Silicon Valley invention. It is a refinement of techniques developed by television networks in the 1970s and 1980s to solve an identical commercial problem: how to keep an audience from leaving. Understanding that lineage does two things simultaneously. It validates the concern about deliberate design, and it complicates the claim that what the platforms built is without precedent. Maybe in scale but certainly not in intention.

The drug metaphor has a birthdate

In 1977, author Marie Winn published The Plug-In Drug, a book that established the conceptual framework for viewing media consumption through the lens of narcotics. Winn argued that television was not merely a source of entertainment but an addictive substance that distorted the childhood experience and eroded family life. Critically, she argued the act of viewing was more significant than the content being viewed: television produced a passive, trance-like state regardless of what was on the screen. The medium itself was the harm.

That argument will be familiar to anyone who has followed the current debate. Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke testified in the 2026 California trial against Meta and Google that social media “drugifies human connection” by stimulating dopamine release through tailored-for-you algorithms. Plaintiffs in ongoing litigation against the platforms argue that infinite scroll, autoplay, and intermittent variable rewards hijack the dopamine systems of children. The vocabulary of addiction, the mechanism of compulsive return, and the claim that the medium itself produces harm regardless of content: all of it is present in Winn’s 1977 text, applied to the family television set.

The transition from the plug-in drug to what one researcher coined the log-in drug is a matter of delivery mechanism and scale, not of conceptual originality. The anxiety is inherited. The engineering that provokes it is not.

What television engineers actually built

To understand the algorithmic feed, it helps to understand what television programmers were doing four decades earlier. In the 1970s, media theorist Raymond Williams identified flow as the defining characteristic of the broadcast television experience. Flow referred to the endless concatenation of programmes and commercials designed to prevent the viewer from ever reaching a natural stopping point. Television networks were not simply providers of individual programmes. They were architects of a continuous content-rich environment whose primary commercial function was to keep eyes on the screen for as long as possible.

To sustain flow and deliver what programmers called demographically desirable eyes to advertisers, broadcast networks developed a toolkit of scheduling techniques at the core of television’s commercial model.

The economic rationale for every technique in that table is identical to the rationale behind Big Tech platform design: construct and sustain a collective entity of consumers whose attention can be sold. The names differ. The logic does not.

How the flow became the feed

The shift from broadcast flow to algorithmic feed is a story of personalisation. Television flow relied on a centralised schedule: every viewer watching at 9pm on a Thursday saw the same content in the same sequence. The network could hammer, hotswitch, and strip, but it operated on a population, not on an individual.

Algorithmic feeds solved the personalisation problem that broadcast could never crack. Where the Who Shot J.R.? cliffhanger drew 83 million US viewers on 21 November 1980 through a single, calculated hook deployed once per season, TikTok’s For You page delivers a structurally equivalent hook every 15 seconds, calibrated to each user’s viewing history. The hotswitching that once required eliminating a commercial break between two programmes now operates at the level of the individual clip, with the next video beginning before the current one ends.

Media scholars describe this as the reintegration of flow into the digital environment. Early theorists of the Internet believed that giving users control over their content consumption, the ability to stop, repeat, rearrange, and discard, would fundamentally disrupt the broadcast logic of passive absorption. That prediction seems to be reaching its limits. As platforms matured, they rebuilt the logic of flow inside a system that also appeared to offer choice. The algorithm now propels the user to the next piece of content before the previous one has been fully processed. The epoché, the moment of pause in which critical judgment might intervene, has been engineered out.

The result is what Cornell researchers working on the 2026 trial described as attention capture deceptive mechanisms: systems that use prior clicks and shares to algorithmically personalise subsequent experiences. Television programmers applied a cruder version of it through scheduling. The platforms have operationalised it at scale.

The framing of the symptomatology is also inherited

The addiction framing produces a consistent set of claimed symptoms across both eras. The table below maps the clinical vocabulary of television-era critics against its social media counterpart.

The consistency of the symptom vocabulary across a fifty-year gap is striking. It also raises a methodological problem that applies to both eras: the descriptions of withdrawal, loss of control, and craving are drawn primarily from clinical observation and parental report rather than from controlled experimental evidence. The same ambiguity that made the 1972 Surgeon General’s television violence report inconclusive despite three years and 23 commissioned studies runs through the current literature on social media and adolescent mental health. The phenomenon looks real. The mechanism remains contested. The policy response in both cases has outrun the proof.

Brain rot: the accusation that recycles

The clearest example of the inherited panic vocabulary is the brain rot narrative, the claim that a new medium is producing a cognitively diminished generation with shortened attention spans and a reduced tolerance for complex thought.

The launch of MTV on 1 August 1981 produced an immediate version of this claim. Critics argued that the fast-cut editing style of music videos was destroying the cognitive capacity of young viewers, creating a generation that demanded constant stimulation and could not sustain attention on long-form content. The MTV generation was pathologised for its engagement with a new visual language in almost exactly the terms now applied to TikTok users.

The attention span figure in that table, the claim that the average human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds since 2000, is worth examining directly. It has been widely cited in corporate training materials and popular journalism. It does not appear in peer-reviewed research; the claim originates in a non-peer-reviewed Microsoft marketing report of 2015 that never defined attention span and said more about screen-switching behaviour than cognitive capacity. The persistence of the claim despite the absence of evidence is itself a feature of the moral panic structure: once a number enters the discourse, its provenance or accuracy becomes irrelevant to its circulation. 

Historical analysis consistently finds that generations pathologised for engagement with new media do not exhibit lasting cognitive deficits. They develop different literacies. The MTV generation became highly fluent in visual media. Comic book readers developed sophisticated sequential narrative comprehension. The prediction that each new format would produce permanent cognitive damage has not been borne out. That pattern should generate skepticism about the current version of the claim, even as the volume and intensity of algorithmic content delivery makes a simple equivalence with MTV implausible.

What Postman saw and what he missed

Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death remains the most intellectually serious foundation for the argument that media technology is never neutral. Postman argued that the structure of a medium determines the nature of the information it can carry, and that television’s requirement for entertainment had converted politics, journalism, education, and religion into the arts of show business.

Postman drew the contrast between Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell feared a state that would ban books and restrict information. Huxley feared a society controlled by an overabundance of pleasure: a soma drug that left the population too distracted to notice their loss of freedom. Postman argued that Huxley, not Orwell, had described the West accurately. Television was the soma.

That argument applies with greater force to the algorithmic feed than it ever did to broadcast television, and for precisely the reasons Postman could not have anticipated. The soma he described was generic: the same programme, the same evening, for every household. The soma delivered by the For You page is personalised to the individual using data that no 1985 broadcaster could have imagined collecting. The decontextualised information environment Postman warned about, where information becomes a commodity irrespective of meaning, has been reproduced at a level of individual precision he did not live to see.

What Postman missed, because the technology did not yet exist, was the feedback loop. Broadcast television could measure audience size through ratings. It could not measure which 30 seconds of a programme caused a viewer to reach for the remote. The algorithmic feed measures everything: dwell time on each frame, scroll speed past each post, the precise second at which a user exits a video. That data is fed back into the system in real time to make the next piece of content more retentive than the last. The broadcast era could optimise for schedule. The platform era optimises for the individual.

The same intent, a larger instrument

The argument this post is making is not that the concerns about social media are equivalent to the concerns about television and therefore equally overblown. The argument is more specific: the engineering intent is identical, the economic logic is identical, and the cultural alarm follows an identical template. What differs is the instrument.

Television flow operated on a population with a shared schedule and no personalisation. Algorithmic flow operates on individuals with complete personalisation and no schedule. The stripping technique that built a daily habit through fixed-time programming now operates through push notifications calibrated to the moment each individual user is most likely to re-engage. The hotswitching that once required a production decision about commercial placement now executes automatically at the video level, millions of times per second.

Marie Winn was right that the medium matters more than the content. Neil Postman was right that the structure of a medium shapes what it can say. Neither of them had a model for a medium that learns its audience individually, adjusts its output in real time, and never turns off. Part 3 of this series turns to what that difference has meant in a courtroom in Los Angeles, and what a jury found that fifty years of media research could not prove.

Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research