I thought about the cultural changes brought about by this and think our common history as Baby Boomers was especially unique.
I say this because for about 40 years or so, we all experienced the new thing called Television but in our lives it was limited but that had a big impact on our culture.
We had three networks; ABC, CBS and NBC. PBS was a junior partner. What this meant is we all had cultural ties to certain things. As a society, we could talk in school or around the office water cooler about the show the next day.
Who hadn't watched the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan Show?
If you lived in the Fifties and Sixties, you knew about:
Milton Berle,
Ozzie and Harriet and David Nelson,
The Flintstones and the Jetsons,
Dick Van Dyke,
Cowboy/Westerns,
Lost in Space,
campy Batman,
The Monkees,
Wild World of Sports and the guy falling down the ski jump,
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and how Marlin got to hold the chimp in the studio while Jim got to wrestle the crocodile,
Laugh-in,
Adam-12,
Walter Cronkite,
space launches live on TV,
Vietnam War coverage from the field,
Watergate,
Saturday Night Live,
Taxi,
Barney Miller,
Dallas,
Cheers,
Challenger exploding,
The Fall of the Berlin Wall...
Then the Fox channel and cable TV started to dilute the common culture and in the 1990s the Internet spread it like a falling rock causing rings in a pond...
So nowadays no one watches the same thing.
Honestly, I've never watched 24 or the Walking Dead. Wildly popular at least here but their numbers are nothing compared to Ed Sullivan's show on a bad night without Topo Gigio (the mouse puppet) and no teenage singing guests.
I don't watch network or even cable news any longer but get it here and on Youtube. I no longer read newspapers or news magazines but listen to Rush on Youtube every evening and read Drudge a couple of times a day.
My 88 year old father still watches the Nightly News every evening and the Today show every morning--he hates Trump--surprised?
Still, we are bound by our culture, so we need to keep in mind the culture we grew up with is dead or in the past.
Kids today have way more choices and avenues to go down. What is popular is some show with a 7% audience rather that the 60-75% of our day.
Different world we live in bud. The challenge is to accept it and move on or get stuck in the past.I know lots still living in the past. No future in that. Although it was a great life for sure.
Little did we know the con the three nets were running even back then,today we are wiser.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials -- many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.
I've not watched TV, don't even own one, since 2008, in fact my 10 year anniversary is coming up, and Mr. Minnow explained it perfectly 57 years ago.