I think they still watch a similar amount. They just also have their phones out now
Yeah I guess that’s another big difference: people used to mostly only be able to consume one dumb thing at a time.
I think the difference is maybe more pronounced with young people. I remember being like 12 and just… sitting there and watching whole episodes of TV shows, back to back, with commercials and everything. I can’t imagine most adults today doing that, let alone kids. You were just sort of captive to whatever happened to be available right then and there. It was usually something you’d seen before, but what else are you going to do? You could read books, but you were also limited to whatever you physically had picked up from the bookstore or library.
I would read the same magazines 2-4 times thru. And I’d read mom’s magazines too. Did I care about a better home or garden? No, but it was better than nothing when my mom had control of the remote and settled on some old musical in black and white
Yep. My parents also had this huge first aid/medical diagnosis tome thing that I spent so much time with as a kid. It had a bunch of pictures of various injuries and illness symptom tables, along with what to go about them. It was actually really fucking rad, and I’m only just now remembering it. You really did have to look hard at your environment to find something to do, but sometimes there were gems.
The typical Fox News addict of today also probably wouldn’t have been caught dead watching anything news related outside of local evening and maybe 20/20 depending on the subject matter. The CNN nerds were still watching though.
There was also a better spread of educational programming in popular circulation (talking NASA-owned TLC days and prior here).
