Yes but TV is also, unless you're watching on HBO or another premium service, filled with
interrupts. To me, this is the key difference between TV and other media, and it's the reason we tend to claim TV and social media "rot your brain" while books don't.
Books generally demand prolonged, fixed attention to a single organized subject matter or narrative, and do not interrupt the subject matter or narrative with random interjections of completely unrelated content. This, however, is precisely the sort of interjection TV performs through the means of the advertisement.
Social media in all its forms (twitter, facebook, instagram, et al) is essentially just TV if TV were only advertisements—a random collection of bite-sized, completely unrelated clips that bombard the viewer and gradually erode one's ability to devote continuous attention to a single subject matter. It's no wonder "influencers" are a dominant mode of advertising—they are the natural progression from TV ads. Social media already had the structure of the TV advertisement (a short burst of random information) all the big wigs had to do was convince influencers to start selling stuff directly.
Worse, if you watch TV today, you likely have access to social media on a smart phone. No one wants to watch TV ads so the temptation to fill that space with social media consumption is constant, which leads you to basically fill ad time with even less related or relevant info that has the same level of fragmentation as TV ads but even more extreme.
It's no wonder nobody can focus or remember anything when we've trained our brains to not only be used to but to actively expect random bursts of totally unrelated content at rapid rates. I've been getting worse and worse at being disciplined myself lately and at times quite literally feel like I've unintentionally given myself adhd.
