I’m over 60, from the pre-VCR days. I suspect there are more targeted radio stations today back than in the AM radio days, when it was either music from my mother’s era, classical, or rock - and not even album rock, which came in with FM. Not to mention that then you bought records or listened to the radio - you didn’t have streaming services targeting music for your tastes. As for rock, we had Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys being played on the same station.
How? They both had tailfins. Now if you want to say the ugliest cars today are uglier than cars back then, that I can buy.
Maybe in the very early 1950s where TV owners scaled richer and more cultured. Sure back then we had Rod Serling but today we’ve got even more good stuff, and the writers today don’t have to pussyfoot around controversial issues.
I was going to say that nothing today is as bad as “My Mother, the Car,” but we have reality shows. But the larger amount of programming today means that you can create a far better diet for yourself than we could back then. I lived in New York where we had seven stations, more than just about anyone, but half of them spent their programming day showing old movies.
Hell, I have a DVD set of commercials from the '50s, and on average even the commercials today are better.
Sorry, this geezer likes what we have now better than during my childhood.
I agree that TV is saturated with commercials-all urging us to buy stuff. In particular, the car ads are annoying-showing people diliriously happy over leasing anew car. If you object to that, just do what i do-hit the “Mute” button.
I don’t know. Why do YOU care what people are angry about?
The problem is that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to “opt out”:
Economies of scale practically ensure that outside of major cities that can support niche markets, it is nearly impossible to find stores, restaurants and services that aren’t generic chains with their identical selection of products, lattes and gigantic appetizers.
Media company mergers have now ensured that during a 4 hour drive to my inlaws, I will hear a steady rotation of the same 10 songs by the likes of Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars and Sia, regardless of what station I turn to.
How many damn films about superheroes, dystopian societies serving as thin metaphors for teenage social angst or remakes of 80s and 90s classics must I ignore?
Do people not experience peer pressure to look, dress, act and otherwise confirm to norms established by what the other interchangeable carbon blobs have viewed on their idiot screens?
Even the internet has become tedious because you have to wade through all sorts of embedded sponsored content to actually find real news. Here’s something I didn’t know. Studies have shown that people respond to longer add names. That’s why sponsored ads now have titles like “Major companies hate what this guy is doing to save money on toilet paper costs!”
I think your distinctions answer more to the question posed by the OP - probably my comments are straying off the path. We are specifically talking more about vapid consumer culture and I don’t think Radio 4 falls into that.
Is this a serious question? I feel like it would be hard to not to have some level of awareness of one of the most popular television shows for the past 18 years.
But that’s how they establish their sense of identity, by saying I don’t like this or that. They want to separate themselves from the unwashed masses, unless they don’t wash due to environmental concerns, then they want to separate themselves from the washed masses, like the Dr. Seuss sneetches.