LogFAQs > #940730442

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Technically, it's easy for me to remember a time when TVs had antennas, because two of my friends currently have TVs with digital antennas for local channels.

Eh, bought one of those myself but never bothered setting it up. Like so many other things, it's still in a box somewhere.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But just in terms of playing the "holy shit I'm old" game, I had a semi-portable black and white TV when I was a kid (in addition to the main color TV in my living room). Standard 12 channels (2-13) plus UHF. Pull-out straight antenna. Screw-in plug jacks in the back for rabbit ears. With an attached separate adapter to run coaxial into it for cable.

They were still selling those in the 90s so it's not that old; or, at least, certainly not an indication of how old something is or isn't.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This is essentially what killed Saturday Morning cartoons.

People always ask, "Why did those go away? I always loved them as a kid!" But the main REASON why we loved it so much was because 95% of all other TV was aimed at adults. Apart from a narrow window just before and after school on syndicated channels (which had a HARD cut-off around 5pm), there was nothing on TV for kids at all. So having an entire morning dedicated to you - where you could literally pick and choose which shows you wanted to watch on which channels (along with the agonizing choice of which to pick if two shows you wanted to watch were on at the same time) - just made the whole thing seem like paradise.

Surprised to hear that they're gone entirely? I thought there was at least something left.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I always love when you hear statistics like how more content is uploaded to YouTube in a single minute than any human being could watch in their entire lifetime.

Sure, most of that content is nothing you'd ever want to watch, but it really does underline just how much content IS being produced, across multiple media, that become almost overwhelming to sort through or make time for.

I always doubt those claims and, more importantly, a lot of the stuff being uploaded at any given moment is duplicate.

Otherwise it underscores how far the ball for "content" has fallen, although I'm sure that throughout human history much of that same "content" has been produced, but it just wasn't in a centralized space. Now some of the things that might have only reached a handful of people might hit an audience of 0 -- since not every video gets views -- so, on some level, not much has changed. And, when it comes right down to it, every post in this topic is a form of content in very much the same way every video on YT is (and the posts probably get more views than a lot of YT videos).

Otherwise one-season shows on major networks tend to be better known than the best-known youtuber. Not all content is created equal.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's part of why I've questioned whether or not we're even going to HAVE pop culture as a concept in the future. Pop culture is essentially the shared experiences of given generations of people. Shout "And now I know!" at any 80's kid (at least ones from the US), and they're almost certainly going to come back at you with "And knowing is half the battle", because literally everyone watched GI Joe. Nearly everyone (at least of a certain age) knows about Luke's dad, or who Homer Simpson is, while a slightly older generation remembers when more people watched the MASH finale than have ever watched the Super Bowl. Since the 1950s, kids have been growing up with this shared universe of fiction, where you can make references or metacontextual jokes about movies or shows or songs and assume anyone listening will understand what you're talking about.

Considering how big viral memes go and how many are still referenced to this day, I think the answer is a loud, resounding, "Duh!" A large part of it is because there are limits to what can be done by small content producers. Big studios will always exist because people want high budget productions. If anything, the big budget films do better today than any time in history. Even when adjusting for inflation, *two* of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time have come out in the last five years. And the second-highest was Avatar, which came out 11 years ago.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And considering just how much of our media over the last 20-30 years has relied heavily on pop culture references, how would a lack of pop culture reshape things?

Do you honestly believe that half of Family Guy fans "get" most of the show's pop culture references? And yet FG -- a show that heavily exploits pop culture -- still pulls in surprisingly strong numbers. And those numbers are why in 20 years shows will be making Family Guy references which not everybody will get.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But if a generation of kids grow up watching radically different shows, and with some not watching TV at all and just watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft, will they really ever have media in common?

That's always been true. SW:ANH is one of the biggest drawing films of all time yet there were a lot of people in their teens when it came out who never saw it. You're hung on this idea of shared experience across the population, but you're remembering a world that never really existed.

And honestly, everybody at every point in history thinks that their world is unique and special because they want to feel unique and special. Yes, things change, but tv catching on in peoples' homes and then everybody having a computer isn't the world-changing paradigm you think it is. We're just links in a great chain.


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