TV Dinner Tech

Downsides Of A “Life-Optimized”

The TV Dinner: an American staple. Coined by Gerry Thomas in the 1950s, this ready-made tray of succulent offerings, often slathered in gravy and complimented by a healthy pairing of sweet peas and buttery mashed potatoes, was a smash hit. Marketed as the easy, yet nutritious alternative to the home-cooked family dinner, the instant meal freed up time for overworked housewives and singles alike who were simply tired of stressing over dinnertime. Better yet, and an ingenious marketing move, its inventors added “TV” into the product name. This coaxed customers to associate TV Dinners with the warmth, comfort, and excitement of an entertaining night in with the family gathered around I Love Lucy. What could be better! Evidence of its influence was far reaching, too. In 1950, only 9% of houses in the U.S. had TVs. After the TV Dinner boom of 1954, that number rose to 56%. Frozen peas paired alongside Leave It To Beaver had become synonymous with the everyday household.

Though times have surely changed since then, there might be more in common between the culinary convenience of yesterday and our current culture than we think. As mouth watering as it sounds, I’m not here to only talk about freezer-burned chipped beef and turkey slabs. That said, I do think they were on to something.

The common thread is this: people naturally crave, even back then, a convenient, “optimized” way of life, with quick rewards and simpler, low-cost means to experience what is important to them. Manufacturers and marketers are very keen to this, as they’ve always been. They know the way to people’s hearts—to convince buyers they’ve considered their deepest-held values in the design of their products, down to a T. In the case of TV Dinners, family time, nutritious meals, and the newfound excitement of at-home entertainment were promised to the American household. In theory it seemed like the perfect product, fulfilling every one of those values—no questions asked. In practice, it left much to be desired.

The TV Dinner breakthrough undeniably shifted the way we ate and interacted. But, any promise of only positive leaves us vulnerable to unforeseen consequences. This is particularly true when it comes to adopting a product so immediately, so wholeheartedly. This sudden “life-enhancing” dialog eerily parallels many of the one-sided promises social media companies have made to simultaneously connect, entertain, and optimize.

Improvement, advancement, whatever you’d like to call it—there is a type of untouchable air surrounding the conversation of optimization. To optimize is defined as “making the best or most effective use of a situation, opportunity, or resource” (Oxford, 2020). In our results-driven culture, it’s no wonder we’ve latched on to such a word. Just as adults of the 1950s wanted nothing more than to strengthen their family lives, free up time, and take advantage of TV’s first “Golden Age”, we too strive to be as connected, productive, and included as possible as individuals in the fast-moving 21st century. We’re all desperate for our voices to be heard, to optimize our existence. Social media companies heard us loud and clear, and they were savvy enough to capitalize on this need.

To sell any “person perfecting” product to the public, marketing through emotions is vital. In pairing their product with the excitement, allure, and novelty of at-home entertainment, the inventors of the TV Dinner tapped into a fountain of potential and profit. FOMO runs deep, even if they didn’t have a buzzy acronym for it back then. Thomas, its inventor, thought, “If we could attach a food product to an entertainment medium that everybody wanted to see or have, that we might be more successful.” Bullseye.

Just as food manufacturers found success through emotional association, social media companies have drilled a similar message, also starting with their name. The “social” of social media creates a veil of constant connectivity. The simple act of logging in becomes, in practice, a social one, in which our collective relational needs as humans are supposedly met—exceeded, even. The big difference is, it’s digital. Though apps can market themselves as a one-stop-shop for conversation, contemplation, and cat videos, they are selling us short. The over-reliance on these apps greatly diminishes authentic, in person, face-to-face interactions—the type that truly gets the job done. It’s more realistic to call it “sort-of-social media”. Clunky, I know. No wonder they optimized for something catchier.

Not only does social media guarantee to fulfill our social needs while underdelivering in practice, it actively pulls us from the very values we are seeking in the first place. Dinnertime entertainment foreshadowed a similar story. When American families gathered gleefully around the TV during dinner, it was a novel, exciting feeling. There was something special and sacred about it. Eating while entertained, in today’s world, is now more of a habit that pulls us from the very social interactions that made dinnertime sacred in the first place. In fact, a survey showed that 88% of us are now glued to screens while dining. We like to think of it more as optimized entertainment or multitasking. Experts call it “zombie eating”. This practice promotes overconsumption of both entertainment and food, due to its heavily distracting nature. Unable to give full energy to either activity, we are rarely left satisfied. In the hypnotic gaze of optimization, it’s all too easy to engage past our limit.

Similarly, apps put the burden on each user to practice healthy consumption. Meanwhile, they’ve knowingly given us a remote control with no off-button. In this world, stop cues are drowned out by the static of our obsession with optimization. Social media touts their ability to form infinite communities and prompt conversations that would be impossible in a Twitterless world. Surely this is true, but what they don’t disclose is the chain reaction of having our attention constantly pulled between 3.8 billion potential channels. Signing on in hopes of a healthy social dosage, I constantly find myself fighting my desire to scroll forever. And to my guilty delight, app designers continue to perfect the “infinite scroll”. This is just one example of a barrage of psychologically-driven behavior modifications designed to hook us (see Just…One Byte?).

Just as the families of the 1950s pushed for more accessible entertainment during dinnertime, our current culture has taken that seemingly harmless hope and run with it. We are now obsessed with being entertained at all hours of the day. Online, the more effortless the amusement, the better. Not only is this constant entertainment messing with our ability to be present in reality, the specific kind of channel surfing evokes in us deep feelings of jealousy, envy, fear, outrage, and shame. Tuned into what everyone else in the world is doing at every moment, how can we ever feel like our own lives are enough? It becomes a constant comparison between what I’m accomplishing today vs what that girl from high school who I never spoke to or even liked is eating for breakfast on a Venice vacation. Our average, often boring, and unfiltered days are instantly weighed against the beautified broadcasting of friends and strangers alike. Often those strangers are celebrities. Why not take a peek inside J. Lo’s $28 million mansion when I’m feeling low?

Social media follows through on their promise to optimize our entertainment with flying colors. Tech giants might be wholly convinced, through their skyrocketing stock and champagne-popping success as the world’s fastest-growing enterprise, that they are truly giving the people what they want—but there’s a catch. Chances are, if you polled people on the street on how they’d prefer to spend an afternoon, they probably wouldn’t add 4-hour Instagram jealousy binges to that list. Entertainment by no means equals fulfillment. Now that eyeballs are the new oil, apps’ main mandate is to extract.

Utilizing stuffy spreadsheets and performance reports, tech giants are convinced they’ve also optimized the world’s ability to connect. A harmful mismatch exists, though, between what engagement stats show, and what our true, deeply held values are when it comes to relationships. We are more desperate than ever to cultivate meaningful connections with others. Unfortunately, we have placed that need in the hands of products which only fulfill a small part of that deep human desire. A fast food version of friendship, it is easily packaged and distributed to the masses. Thousands of friends can fit in your pocket. They can even keep you company while you eat your microwave meal alone. You have no obligation to talk to them either—a quick scroll does the job.

On the surface, social media is marketed as a complete social experience. In reality, it lacks the nuance and face-to-face social cues necessary for maintaining deep relationships. This false promise leads to “social snacking”, a term coined by W. Gardner. These are symbols that provide temporary stopgaps for social hunger when in-person social interaction is unavailable. Social media “snacks” include bright notifications, photos, approval metrics, and comments, all which do fulfill, if only temporarily, some desire for social contact. It’s becoming easier than ever to replace face-to-face friendships with these handy, metric-driven ones. The former takes dedicated work to cultivate, the latter saves time. And in the quest for an optimized life, our time is their money.

There’s no doubt, social media has succeeded in commercializing and digitizing social life. Not only has it expanded the channels through which we communicate, it has monopolized the landscape enough to convince many of us that apps should be the place for social interaction. If optimization is the highest priority, who needs a Town Square when you have Twitter? Our memories and connections are freeze-dried in time online, always there to snack on whenever we’re feeling lonely in real life during the many hours we spend staring down.

The TV Dinner was once marketed and accepted as a connective, nutritious meal. It has now, in many ways, assumed a lower quality, as a sort of “last minute” passive option. This shift happened when people became more aware of the fact that it was simply not a sufficient substitute for the real thing. My hope is that social media’s optimizing narrative is scrutinized with a similar skepticism.

While we lovingly praise platforms for gifting us low-risk, low-cost, and convenient ways to communicate, we become blind to the fallout that comes with these social shortcuts. We feel a semblance of satisfaction in use and call it a balanced meal. We scorch our tongues on 1-minute microwaved gravy, too distracted in entertainment to notice it’s scalding. While grasping for a life-optimized, it’s crucial we ask who is truly benefiting most from these “advancements”. In the all-nighters techies pulled to make these platforms possible in the first place, I’m sure microwaved meals were in abundance. Quick, easy, and cheap—Silicon Valley knows best.