alt Hacker NewsI remember when we organized our lives around television. On Saturday mornings it would be cartoons (including the first full-CGI television shows, Reboot and Transformers: Beast Wars), Wednesday evenings would be Star Trek: TNG, Fridays would be the TGIF block of family shows (from early-to-mid-90s USA perspective here). It felt like everyone watched the same thing, everyone had something to talk about from last night's episode, and there was a common connection over what we watched as entertainment.
We saw a resurgence of this connection with big-budget serials like Game of Thrones, but now every streaming service has their own must-watch thing and it's basically as if everyone had their own personal broadcast station showing something different. I don't know if old-school television was healthy for society or not, but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately.
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This is something I've been lamenting for a long time. The lack of shared culture. Sometimes a mega-hit briefly coalesces us, but for the most part everyone has their own thing.
I miss the days when everyone had seen the same thing I had.
Planet Money recently released an episode that mentions some of these points around drop vs drip programming
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5646673/stranger-things...
This is why I like it when streaming services release one episode every week instead of dropping the whole season in one shot.
> but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately
Mass media isolates individuals who don't have access to it. I grew up without a TV, and when TV was all my neighbors could talk about, I was left out, and everyone knew it.
While other children were in front of the television gaining "shared experience", I built forts in the woods with my siblings, explored the creek in home made boats, learned to solder, read old books, wrote basic computer programs, launched model rockets, made up magic tricks. I had a great childhood, but I had a difficult time connecting with children whose only experiences were these shallow, shared experiences.
Now that media is no longer "shared", the fragmented content that people still consume has diminishing social value -- which in many cases was the only value it had. Which means there are fewer social consequences for people like me who choose not to partake.