This can easily be channeled into a positive. If you are consuming information that has value I don't see the problem. I binge a little on engineering videos each week that add to my personal and professional life. I love absorbing new information. It is a far cry from going down youtube holes of reality tv highlights, celebrity news, or other modes of cultural decay.
Honestly, sometimes I worry that watching engineering videos online is worse than the vacuous shit that normal people watch.
I go through phases, things like aircraft, off grid living, hydropower, welding, CNC, machining, woodworking, electronics, gardening, farming, hydroponics.
Few of those are relevant to my day job or even my current living arrangements. But when I get really interested in a subject I'll devour every shred of information I can find on it.
The problem is, I doubt I'd get distracted in the middle of the working day thinking about Love Island, not so for the more "useful" things I've read and watched.
I agree that a lot of these things are terrible as sources of long-term distraction - a vacuous TV show might take my attention while I watch it and a bit after, but the uses of a 3D printer can set me up to nerd-snipe myself for weeks. And even in the short-term, I think they tend to bypass some of my mental 'defenses'; they're pseudo-useful so it doesn't feel like wasted time, and they're below the addictiveness level that triggers my allergy to e.g. freemium games. Addictive games and TV feel like talking to a scam caller, while almost-useful stuff feels like a really good low-pressure salesman.
That said, some of that distraction does actually pay off. (Especially if I can fight the instinct to learn about stuff that needs rarified tools or large-scale projects; I'm not going to build my own airplane no matter how cool it would be.) Being able to graft a tree, tie a fishing lure, or cut a hole with questionable tools are at least usable skills, so if I can to low-tech or relatively commonplace stuff, it's a decent way to channel the urge for distraction into some kind of utility.
I was always interested in electrical engineering and after a couple years of watching stuff on youtube and trying it out myself, all from a leisure time perspective, it turned out I became qualified enough to do it professionally. I've been doing firmware forever and now I design the gadgets too. It has been very valuable.
Maybe I'm old, or maybe I'm not a visual or aural learner, but I don't get much out of watching Youtube videos. Do you find them a better learning tool than reading a well produced document or tutorial?
For many in younger generations (including myself), watching a youtube video - even a dry educational one - scratches an "I'm being entertained" itch, perhaps born of being raised watching television. Something deeply rooted adores fast-paced audiovisual stimuli. Reading a well written document does not have the same effect. It's troubling.
I prefer to read to learn, overall, but I really like that a video of someone doing the thing I want to learn will communicate their assumptions and less tangible knowledge via their actions.
I'm of the opinion that this sort of thing is not any different than reality TV highlights or celebrity news. It's all mostly useless information that feels good going in but doesn't add much value int he end.
Neil Postman touches on this in 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' - here's a nice quote that gets at how I feel. Although he's talking about the telegraph and photography, I think it applies well to the internet and video.
"In a peculiar way, the photograph was the perfect complement to the flood of telegraphic news from nowhere that threatened to submerge readers in a sea of facts from unknown places about strangers with unknown faces. For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names. Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that "the news" had a connection to something within one's sensory experience. It created an apparent context for the "news of the day." And the "news of the day" created a context for the photograph. But the sense of context created by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely illusory. You may get a better sense of what I mean here if you imagine a stranger's informing you that the illyx is a subspecies of vero miform plant with articulated leaves that flowers biannually on the island of Aldononjes. And if you wonder aloud, "Yes, but what has that to do with anything?" imagine that your informant replies, "But here is a photograph I want you to see," and hands you a picture labeled Illyx on Aldononjes. "Ah, yes," you might murmur, "now I see." It is true enough that the photograph provides a context for the sentence you have been given, and that the sentence provides a context of sorts for the photograph, and you may even believe for a day or so that you have learned something. But if the event is entirely self-contained, devoid of any relationship to your past knowledge or future plans, if that is the beginning and end of your encounter with the stranger, then the appearance of context provided by the conjunction of sentence and image is illusory, and so is the impression of meaning attached to it. You will, in fact, have "learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers with photographs), and the illyx will fade from your mental landscape as though it had never been. At best you are left with an amusing bit of trivia, good for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving acrossword puzzle, but nothing more."
