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Ty Cobb's avatar

It is still all monocultural for me as I only speak one language and poorly at that! Thank God I don’t have to watch the channels with other languages! As a guy whose grip has traded baseball bats for softball bats and is now mostly handling a remote and trying to remember lines from the DUKE like “That’ll be the day” I like being able to dive in at a selected movie or series and then grab the next desired morsel. I like those Australian oddities and a lot of the Brits and Bollywood. Fortunately the weather is nice here and I can go to the balcony sometimes and watch people walking their dogs, cycling or surfing before re-aiming that little black box in my hand. 👊

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Steve Peterman's avatar

I absolutely loved the millennial perspective of this piece, which did its job of reminding me what television viewing was like in my childhood. I am old enough to remember thinking that the only reason my parents had children was so my dad could sit in his Archie chair (years before All In The Family) and tell whichever one of us was in the room to walk over and turn the actual dial on the TV to change the channel to one of the very few options we had - CBS, ABC, NBC and Channel 18 on VHF (look it up). On a slow TV night during a muggy summer it could be exhausting.

And then came the first remote, which was slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes (look it up) and basically consisted of an on/off button, an up/down channel button, and a volume button.

On the one hand, yes, with so few options you did have the shared community of shows that everyone watched and talked about, but if you weren't home when the show you loved aired, or your parents wanted to watch something lame on another channel, or you had homework, or you were grounded because you'd been caught with heroin or something, you were out of luck until, if you were lucky, you caught the episode you'd missed during summer reruns. And if you missed it then, you had missed it forever. Or until it went into syndication years later when you were either in college or in jail for that heroin thing.

Now, you can watch every show that's ever been on, pretty much anytime you want, plus Canadian curling! And you can pause them when it's time to call your mother, or your significant other wants to tell you about a fascinating article they just read online about the history of paprika. I'll take today.

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