A Brief History of Flow | Los Angeles Review of BooksA Brief History of Flow<br>What the internet learned from television.<br>By Max L. FeldmanJuly 11, 2026<br>Cultural Studies
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This essay is a preview of the summer issue of our print journal, the LARB Quarterly, no. 49: Traffic, out now. Become a member for more essays, criticism, poetry, fiction, and art—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.
May what I do flow from me like a river,<br>no forcing and no holding back,<br>the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,<br>these deepening tides moving out, returning,<br>I will sing to you as no one ever has,<br>streaming through widening channels<br>into the open sea.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Here I go<br>Deep type flow<br>Jacques Cousteau could never get this low
—Ol’ Dirty Bastard
THE 1990S ARE ancient history. A lost world, still broad and wide. Cuboid city skylines gleamed in forgiving morning light; boardrooms full of newly empowered mothers stirring their coffee with crystal powder ground from the shattered glass ceiling. They lived in shining suburban palaces, mortgages serenely fixed by smilers in boxy three-button suits, doors framed by polyurethane pillars in the Tuscan style, pools glimmering. Petticoated nannies made sure the little ones were towed to school by mighty yellow chariots. Toga-clad fathers paid alimony with foaming dot-com profits, graying ponytails afloat on the ventilated breeze of their vast offices. An optimistic age shimmering golden-red at the twilight of history.
Things were, of course, nasty then, as now. They had local horrors (Somalia, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Rwanda). But our crises are here, there, and everywhere—including one about the very meaning of “here” or “there” or “everywhere.” Faraway things seem much closer; the recent past feels older than it really is. This isn’t just because we can instantly get anything we want on the internet. Nor is it because so many more things claim our attention. What matters is how everyone on the planet, all living under one interconnected economic system, now experiences space and time simultaneously. But how this feels isn’t really much different from the flow of images in a now antiquated medium—television—which in the 1990s, with cable and satellite packages becoming widely available, was reaching its apotheosis, as measured by market saturation and viewing hours (which would hold through the first decade of the 21st century), at the same moment as the emergence of a new technological paradigm that would overthrow it.
Writing when people worried that television had created a crisis of attention and declining literacy standards, the most insightful critics, among them Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and David Foster Wallace, show us how today’s problems aren’t as new as we think. Returning to these texts provides a more reliable guide for understanding the perceptual regime of social media and streaming services than those of contemporary observers. That is, reading (an apparently threatened skill) now dated pieces of writing (ditto) about television (a near obsolete medium) has much to tell us about now. None of them imagined, of course, that we’d freely choose devices that watch us as we watch them, but they do show how our viewing habits, like our cultural anxieties, have a history. They suggest that the type of attention we pay to short-form video content—immersive, avoidant, near dissociative—is rooted in the way we watched television, despite today’s apparent breadth of user choice. Those texts, however, focus not just on the effects of television but also on how the interaction between a technology and existing cultural forms shapes how we emotionally invest in what we’re watching and how. Williams in particular was keen to avoid both “technological determinism” (technology directly causes what we do) and “determined technology” (society directly shapes technology). Technologies have shaped our ways of seeing, and our perceptual habits likewise shape technology.
What Williams, writing in the 1970s, called “flow”—the undifferentiated broadcast sequence comprising shows, commercials, and trailers—has not disappeared but intensified. New types of content move from one item to the next in a manner similar to when people “hopped” between channels, but how they deliver information or tell stories concentrates processes that television already began. Broadcasting was premised on what we think and feel being predictable. What we saw and when we saw it were reduced to cues planned long in advance. Shows were industrial products: the parts fit together on the model of an assembly line and were...